Viewing profile — padobson

Now when I come across ‘competitive nerds’ I’m extra cautious to not appear to be too threatening to their assent to alpha nerd status I agree with this approach. Being highly comp…

25-30 years ago, there was a game studio called 2am Games that made a series of strategy-type Java games that allowed online multiplayer. All the games were monetized with ad click…

The core usefulness of OOP is usability. This is the reason I find it useful. To me, OOP is as much about your organization as it is about the best way to load, transform, present,…

I'm definitely curating as I scan my library. The first thing I look for is the potential for insight due to a host-guest paring that I may not have seen before - or that I have an…

I bought a copy of Hamlet with copious footnotes a year ago, and I really enjoyed reading it - but I found the language too taxing for leisure reading. I'd return to my work and fi…

I took 3 years off once and kept to myself and loved it. Were you stoned the whole time? I only ask because if you're loving what you're doing, then there's usually some modus oper…

Didn't think I'd see camels going through needle eyes on HN today, but here we are!

I'm with you here. I have a personal rule that the first information into my head each day comes from the Bible, which for all the criticism it gets is ultimately a story of hope i…

Certainly those late 90s budgets all kept government expenditures below 20% of GDP. You could also try to raise taxes without stifling growth (and thus reducing revenues), but that…

I read Gleick's The Information[0] a few years ago and was riveted. Do you have any suggestions for further reading if I wanted to take a hobbyist interest? [0] https://en.wikipedi…

There was a surplus from 1998-2001[0], so in living memory of most people reading this. It's worth mentioning this happened under a Democratic president and Republican congress, no…

For the curious, here's the debt limit bill that passed the Republican-led House of Representatives at the end of April, HR 2811: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house…

Is there a mechanism for empowering a polity to protect minors from certain things the polity deems they're not ready for that doesn't rely on arbitrary rules?

This is my answer. How do you know you've learned something? If you're learning how to build something, you know you've learned it when you can build it. Fiction is a little toughe…

of course one with deliberate and heavy homoerotic overtones Is it? Or was platonic affection more socially acceptable at the time? I don't have an answer, but I've seen solid argu…

This makes sense. Prices are literally encoding information - first the demand for the item being priced and then the cost of supplying the item. The price of beef is signaling a l…

Yes, absolutely correct. I'd say the Showtime Lakers are the poster child for fast pace in the 80s. This is why I included the number of teams. PPG has fluctuated across eras, but …

Not sure how deep you intended this joke to go, but the NBA had 23 franchises in 1980 [0] that scored 108 points per game[1]. Now there are 30 franchises scoring 114 points per gam…

This. It was all I could think about while reading the piece. The US Navy is capable of making the seas safe, but under current political conditions I don't even see THAT happening…

Massive airships flying 90/km an hours are LESS susceptible to blockades than cargo ships? I think I'll need a little more explanation than that. Seems like a shoulder-mounted rock…

I would bet the factors that lead to following John Carmack highly correlate with the factors that lead to opening an HN account.

Have you spoken to anyone at Steam or GOG or the like and just asked them for a list of Indie games that don't sell? Obviously, one reason they don't sell is that they're bad games…

+1 for getting away from the screen. I've stopped buying eBooks for exactly this reason. A glass of wine or bourbon and a book with a soft lamp is a much better way to power down a…

I identify with this. I heard somewhere that certain high performing folks only need five hours of sleep a night. I tried this for a week and it was a disaster. Damage to work. Dam…

I like that the title implies that Gunpei Yokoi[0] is God. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi