The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame • Hacker News Board

Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

#51

Post by trhtrsh » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 10:08 PM UTC

gngeal wrote: post #23

detritus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no - it's abundantly not trying to be sensationalist. Life typically means just that - it's not some shorthand for a term of imprisonment.

"Life typically means just that - it's not some shorthand for a term of imprisonment." Can you show me an actual statistics on what percentage of "X faces life" in English texts relates to severe criminal charges, and what percentage means something "non-sensationalist"? Because as a non-native speaker, I've always seen it in the former context.

Where the heck would anyone find a corpus of text to study that phrase?

Oh, https://www.google.com/search?q=faces+life+after

(Incidentally, Google's de-duplication logic fails horribly on that query. 6 of the top 10 results are the same blogspam-copied story, and it's not even fresh news.)

Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

#52

Post by kingkawn » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 10:10 PM UTC

jgoney wrote: post #44

"Last year, Persson earned over a hundred million dollars from the game and its merchandise." If you made that kind of money, why would you even bother to do anything but just retire and enjoy life?

I'm not saying it doesn't ever happen, but often the people who have this kind of success don't get there by aiming for retirement.

Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

#53

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 10:23 PM UTC

spullara wrote: post #34

DanBC wrote: post #6

> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…

This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?

[deleted]

Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

#54

Post by pdog » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 10:24 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #49

kostya-kow wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From programmer's perspective, Minecraft is nothing special (and it's written in Java!). There is much better code out there. Quality of programming and success are not necessarily related.

Have you actually seen him coding? From what I have heard/seen on video, he is very fast, his code is readable and relatively concise (for Java). And efficiently displaying this giant fully-modifiable voxel world on all types of hardware is no small feat. Also the procedural landscape generation is fairly brilliant. And the whole crafting system that allowed for world modification. I think you should give him credit…

Watched him live coding August 2011 -- it was incredible. I know there are better programmers, especially on a systems level, but it's still just... wow.

http://www.twitch.tv/notch

Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

#55

Post by codygman » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 10:27 PM UTC

jgoney wrote: post #44

"Last year, Persson earned over a hundred million dollars from the game and its merchandise." If you made that kind of money, why would you even bother to do anything but just retire and enjoy life?

In his case retire and enjoy life might be the exact same as what he's doing now. Programming minecraft :D

Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

#56

Post by AskHugo » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 10:37 PM UTC

spullara wrote: post #34

DanBC wrote: post #6

> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…

This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?

I'm 19. I started when I was 14 by hosting and modifying a private server (in Java) for a popular mmorpg.

Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

#57

Post by JEVLON » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 10:48 PM UTC

spullara wrote: post #34

DanBC wrote: post #6

> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…

This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?

On my playstation 2 I had a demo disc that had a YaBasic compiler. I wrote game code with my controller. I used other people's source code to make pong and pac-man, and had little understanding of what I was doing - but still managed to change the colours. It also introduced me to manually checking the syntax of the code. http://members.iinet.net.au/~jimshaw/yabasic.me.uk/faq/

Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

#58

Post by BSousa » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 10:51 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #49

kostya-kow wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From programmer's perspective, Minecraft is nothing special (and it's written in Java!). There is much better code out there. Quality of programming and success are not necessarily related.

Have you actually seen him coding? From what I have heard/seen on video, he is very fast, his code is readable and relatively concise (for Java). And efficiently displaying this giant fully-modifiable voxel world on all types of hardware is no small feat. Also the procedural landscape generation is fairly brilliant. And the whole crafting system that allowed for world modification. I think you should give him credit…

Not wanting to take anything from notch, but I do concur with the parent. I've seen his live casts, and sure they are great, but let's not kid ourselves, his code is not that great. He is fast cause he knows the libraries he uses very well (which is admirable) but at the time, put me in front of DX9 and my speed was the same. Now put me in front of iOS code and I can probably match it. I think he just got to that status where people idolise him (heck, I remember when his first livecast was out, 100s of blogs doing their own 'what I learn from watching notch code' like he was some super coder, which weren't much more than typical stuff you learn in the first 2-3 years working at a company(at least in games).

And from other sources (can't verify) minecraft code is reported to be quite bad, which is the main reason many of the bugs weren't fixed very fast.

Having said that, he had a vision, executed it well and made a lot of money. My hat is off to him for that.

Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

#59

Post by carb » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 11:00 PM UTC

moultano wrote: post #41

spullara wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?

I was bored in class and programmed my graphing calculator.

This was my main introduction as well. (I'm 21.) I remember looking through the TI-84 manual and reading through the commands to see what I could do.

Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame

#60

Post by TillE » Sat, Apr 06, 2013, 11:19 PM UTC

trhtrsh wrote: post #50

applecore wrote: post #30

> “I have the ability to get code done, but I’m impatient and it’s scrappy as a result. Maybe that helped me with Minecraft, as it came quickly. But, well, at some point, I’d like to actually become a good programmer.” It's amazing that he doesn't consider himself to be a good programmer. In what other profession would someone as accomplished as Persson say that?

A musician might. There aren't that many professions were a decent piece of work that makes one person happy can scale up to make a million people happy with minimal marginal effort.

Excellent example. Most famous rock musicians aren't extraordinarily talented at playing their instruments - Richard Wright of Pink Floyd couldn't even read sheet music. Jimmy Page is quite a sloppy guitarist.

Pure technical ability is a dime a dozen. Check YouTube for a zillion teenagers who can play shred guitar as well as anyone. But inspired creativity is rare and valuable, and execution requires only a certain level of technical ability, not mastery.