johnswamps
johnswamps on Hacker News
Here's a quick summary for anyone who is not familiar with the Mass Effect series. Mass Effect is a 3 part RPG shooter series of blockbuster video games developed by Bioware, which is owned by Electronic Arts. The first 2 games were very popular and loved by fans. The 3rd and final game was recently released. The majority of the story and gameplay were well received by pretty much everyone, but many fans of the series are upset about how the game ended. There's almost universal disappointment on on-line forums (though people who liked it are probably less vocal). A couple of complaints are
1. Despite the series being based on players being able to make different choices that affect the story, almost nothing the player does throughout the series affects the ending.
2. Although players have a choice of 3 different options during the ending affecting the fate of the galaxy, the only thing that changes in the following cutscenes is the color of some explosions (green for one choice, red for another, blue for the last)
3. The ending felt like a deus ex machina and wasn't satisfying
Lots of fans have expressed their criticism on-line, with many hoping that Bioware will "fix" the ending or release a DLC that alters or extends the ending. This is Bioware's first response as far as I know.
Great site. But if you're interested in roguelikes I'd suggest starting with Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead (
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/). Nethack's really showing its age these days and is missing a lot of key features. Crawl is more accessible to newcomers and is less tedious to play. But it is very much a roguelike in the spirit of Nethack.
A lot. Much of it isn't really relevant to beginners, but here's a quick list off the top of my head. Maybe broken wasn't the right word, these are just general problems with the game
1. The endgame is too easy and boring.
2. Elbereth and #pray make it too easy to get out of tough spots
3. Most classes end up playing similarly after the midgame (either wizard or melee typically)
4. Wands of wishing, magic markers, and polypiling are too powerful
5. The game is nearly unbeatable without spoilers
6. Sokoban is boring after you've played through it a few times
7. There's a bunch of cheap tactics like pudding farming
8. It's too generic and boring to put together an ascension kit. There are very few trade-offs you need to make in choosing what armor and weapons to use
9. The religion aspect is too simplistic
10. Combat gets tedious in the endgame. Most of the time you're just plowing through monsters. This results in tons of "battle spam" with you getting several messages like "You hit the minotaur!" every turn, forcing you to not read them and possibly miss important information
11. The game requires several patches to be playable (menucolors, sortloot, hpmon, etc.)
12. The default options are pretty bad
13. Traveling and exploring can be boring
Wow, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be. But I only write so much because I care :) I had a lot of fun beating nethack and and it's one of my favorite games of all time. I'm possibly prouder of beating nethack than of my MS degree :)
I would try playing Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead. It's another roguelike that is heavily inspired by nethack but is more modern and more beginner friendly. I love nethack (I've ascended twice) but it's definitely showing it's age (not to mention that the game is pretty broken in some regards). Crawl has a better interface and tries to remove all the tedious parts of roguelikes, though there's still a learning curve.
I don't think that's true. There's 51 volumes of 400-450 pages, or ~23,000 pages. Let's say you can read half a page a minute, or 7.5 pages per day (at 15 minutes of reading per day).
(23,000 pages)/(7.5 pages / day) = ~3,000 days or a bit over 8 years.
Posted by
johnswamps on Tuesday June 21, 2011 @07:05PM
from the ask-hn dept.
Anything from framework features, editors, technologies, hosting, deployment, standards, conventions, whatever. What are the biggest obstacles preventing you from easily writing modern web applications? And if you have and ideas on how to fix it, I'd be interested in that as well.I'm less interested in non-technical issues (dealing with clients, etc.)
Yeah, the same thing happened to me a couple of years ago and at the time I thought I was the coolest guy on the planet when I recovered most of my data. I had accidentally deleted all my chat logs. Luckily, all the chat logs had a timestamp in them, so I just searched for all timestamped lines on the disk and dumped them to a file. I then wrote a script to group and sort all the logs based on the date and who I was talking to and recreate all the files. It worked better than it had any right to especially since I was doing everything on a live disk!
Clearly any semi-decent programmer can mentally translate 5 * 60 * 1000 into 5 minutes. So what? This is nonetheless a more intuitive and less error prone way to write times. This is about making readers of your code spend less cognitive effort figuring out what your code does, decreasing the chances of bugs (oops, I missed a 0 or screwed up a conversion factor), and making your code easier to modify. You seem to think this is a plugin for programmers too dumb to use milliseconds; it's not. Stop making excuses for bad code.
That said, sure, this isn't exactly a huge issue that's plaguing the javascript community. I probably won't use this plugin.
Here are mine (minus the silly time wasting ones):
art, askscience, books, buddhism, cfb, coding (it's dead these days though), cooking, fitness, frugal, listentothis, lgbt, longtext, netsec, oney, philosophyofscience, scifi, skeptic, space, sports, starcraft, truereddit, twoxchromosomes,
This happens every bundle. Most people in my experience have concluded that
1. Linux users having fewer games to choose from so they are willing to pay more for whatever games do come out
2. Linux users want Linux to seem like a viable platform for gaming to encourage more game development for Linux
3. There's probably also a competitiveness to seem "better" than Windows users.
See e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2004968
That would be difficult to implement in javascript, I think. Once you zoom in far enough using a float/double doesn't give you enough precision to calculate each pixel accurately. The typical solution is to switch to some sort of bignum library. That's going to be really slow in javascript.
In general though, infinite zoom mandelbrot programs do exist (don't know of any off the top of my head though), they're just trickier to implement.
These sorts of questions are a popularity contest. Books aren't upvoted based on how influential they are, but based on how many voters have read and liked them. So _because_ it is chosen by the whole community you can expect a book like Code Complete: it touches on some of the fundamental principles of programming and is a book that almost every programmer can learn from. This works well for SO I think.
I'm not the parent, but lots of people complain that the SC2 maps are too small. You can quickly get to your opponents base on small maps which making early agression powerful, resulting in a lot of short games. If you've watched the last two GSLs, you probably noticed a lot of < 10 minute games (e.g lots of 2 rax all-in/pressure builds). By contrast, SC:BW games tend to be a lot longer and more exciting where you get to see many if not all expansions on the map taken, more strategy when it comes to unit composition besides just "well you weren't ready for my early game push so I just won easily", map control becomes essential, harassment, etc.
Nope, maybe the domain name "socialcam" triggered it
onomatopoeic -> alliterative? I don't think anything makes a sound like "pizza profitable" :)
If done deliberately, could this be a useful feature so that users can typo a password (say levenshtein distance <= 1 or 2) and still login? Obviously the major downside is that you would need a longer password to get the same level of security and it could be difficult to implement especially since the password should be hashed. Is this feasible? I'm guessing the answer is no, but was wondering what other people thought.
It's probably requesting "tabs" permissions. The Chrome security permissions aren't fine grained enough so often you need to request permission for a lot more than you actually need. For some reason requesting "tabs" shows a scary warning about having access to all your history. You'll find that a ton of extensions need access to your history for this reason, it's actually really annoying as an extension developer.
> Also, it does this with a high learning curve and without using any kind of reward schedule mechanics that are in vogue now.
The game has a reward schedule in the form of hard to find materials (diamond). It's not uncommon to spend half an hour strip mining underground looking for materials. 19/20 times you just find more stone, but every once in a while you find coal, iron, diamond, etc.
Perhaps you missed the "Analytics by Mixpanel" logo at the bottom of the page? :)
(Yes I realize it's not actually being used)
Yes and no. I spend a lot of time on HN because it's one of the best places to spend my time when I'm not being productive and in that sense it does hurt my productivity.
But if HN didn't exist I'd just be spending the time on other sites instead (like reddit).
I agree with the statement, but I disagree that it's responsible for the income and wealth disparity beween the rich and poor. Yes, money will make you more money, but by definition that increases your income.
No, it means that if you're poor, you're spending a larger percentage of your income and saving less of it. Poor people have to spend a higher percentage of their money on basic necessities such as rent, food, clothing, transportation, etc.
If anyone is curious, here are the median starting salaries for graduates from Stanford's CS/EE departments (survey was self selecting so the numbers are probably skewed up, but there were a large number of responses):
Undergrad: 80k
Masters: 87k
PhD: 114k
