Just wanted to say: thank you for making and maintaining this. I’m sorry that so many of the initial comments on this HN post are from one person complaining that their submissions didn’t get accepted. That’s the thing with the personal web: it’s personal! It’s what that person wants, which happens to be the thing that makes it great. If you don’t like it, the rest of the internet is still there.
A slight spoiler, but there's a reason why some spaces are '?' - they hint that one specific type of creature may be nearby. (Think of the one that looks like a Beholder from D&D).
For the walls - think of them as an HP sink. The game largely revolves around using your health as efficiently as possible to explore the board. Walls are useful since you can attack them 1 HP at a time to get the XP out of them (thus allowing you to always fully use your allotment before refilling your health).
Prost and Senna were evenly matched – that's why the racing between them was so great, and why the rivalry was so pitched. Senna was faster than Prost in qualifying and over a single lap, and vastly better in rainy conditions. Prost had better race-craft and was more consistent lap-over-lap, race-over-race. They were both otherworldly.
Not to put words in OP's mouth, but I'd guess the weirdness is in a couple of things:
1) Jimmy can go deep on some extremely obscure corners of the industry (e.g. interactive fiction movements that maybe only a few dozen academic acolytes are even aware of).
2) The occasional deep tangent. For example, I don't think a month-long mini-biography of Edward Mannock was really necessary to appreciate the Amiga game _Wings_. But then again, I loved that tangent, so it's the kind of weirdness that I can personally embrace. I'm guessing the Analog Antiquarian is going to end up ultimately absorbing that energy anyway.
For the NY Times, the assertion that most of their revenue comes from advertising just isn't true. 60% of their revenue now comes from subscription fees, and advertising's slice of their revenue has shrunk consistently.
Try passing along a vinyl or CD or VHS or DVD collection when you die. See how fast it ends up at a flea market, or on the curb waiting for the trash truck. ALL digital goods are ephemeral one way or the other, unless you're an actual archivist. That's why archivists are important as their own discipline.
It's true there's a non-zero chance the property market implodes, but the shift to remote workers is exactly what WeWork is counting on. Many (even most) people chafe at working in their living space 100% of the time, and squatting in coffee shops and the like also has its limits. People generally need a work place that is separate from their living place, even if their work place is not the same work place as the rest of their company. Throw in the need for quiet places, conference rooms, whiteboards, etc, and before you know it...
The implication here is that a lot of value associated with 2019-era VC-funded startups is derived from the revenue they receive by selling to other VC-funded startups.
If we're keying off of personal anecdote, allow me to be a single point in favor of the touch bar. I actually like the thing, and find it useful. Yes, I do!
I put my money on the former. 4chan is... itself. But it is definitely a vibrant community. And Poole himself has some thoughtful, unique insight into what makes a community vibrant and what kills it.
It's interesting how this article conflicts the narrative (and indeed, Fitzgerald's own narrative) about his life. The narrative was that they lived fabulously until the simultaneous stresses of the the stock market crash and Zelda's mental breakdown in 1929. Turns out that at least from an income perspective, he was doing quite well up until the moment he died. But Zelda's healthcare costs ruined him anyway, and he cognitively backed himself in a corner in terms of making adjustments.
It reminds me of a quote from another famous author, one Charles Dickens:
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
There are many, many objectives for which the F1 rules need to account. Competitive balance is one of them. Providing interesting and relevant technical challenges for automakers and teams is another (and was a major driver behind the recent switch to hybrid engines). In addition to those, you have safety, spectacle, cost-containment, logistical considerations, and about a thousand other goals that need to be incorporated. The FIA takes incredible flak for whatever they do because there are myriad tradeoffs between these objectives, and it's impossible to balance them all in a way that makes everyone happy.
For those who need the context -- when Reddit had that big bust-up last week about banning subreddits like /r/fatepeoplehate, aggrieved commenters were recommending that others migrate to voat.co. That effectively means that voat.co recently absorbed the slimy runoff of Reddit's worst element.
Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.
To be clear here, it's not a single thumb drive (as the title implies) but a network of thumb drives distributed through an ad-hoc parcel service. Frankly, it doesn't sound that different than the old shareware and disc-based multimedia subscription services that used to exist in the US in the early-to-mid-90s (such as LAUNCH and SoftDisk). The biggest difference I can see is that (a) it's largely pirated content and (b) there's seems to be some user generated content as well.
Exactly. One could easily come up with a corollary: "The worst startup ideas are the ones that seem like bad ideas and really are." Which is a truism that probably applies to most startup ideas.
Perestroika is the era in Soviet history when the USSR began to 'thaw' in its relationship to the West and reform its economic policy to be less collectivized and more capitalistic.
In this case, Microsoft would be the USSR and its policy of closed-source Windows/.NET domination would be the old Communist Party hegemonic philosophy. That would make Satya Nadella Microsoft's Mikhail Gorbachev.
And it was the perfect choice, precisely for what it said about his character at the beginning of the show. Walter White, the put-upon high school chemistry teacher living in quiet desperation, driving around in a car generally perceived to be a big, swinging two-ton white flag to the world.
I think that's what he was driving at with the following quote:
"Many people in the car business do not understand that a vehicle has an image. To them, a vehicle is a collection of attributes. If your attributes are better than the other guy’s attributes, you’re gonna win. It’s engineer thinking, along totally rational lines. Their advice to an alcoholic is “stop drinking—is there something about that you don’t understand?” That’s not how people actually think."
If you add up an Aztec as a collection of attributes, it was a damn fine vehicle. If you engage with it from the perspective of an actual consumer -- a sometimes irrational, emotionally-influenced person whose sense of self is in some small way defined by the vehicle they drive -- the Aztec is a fiasco. Part of the function of a car is how the driver feels to own it, so form is part of the function. And the Aztec was a complete failure at providing that part of the function.
Read the article. He mentions that "someone suggested to them to audit and they found 'Millions and millions of dollars of error not in our favor.'" Shady accounting practices were used to intentionally mask earnings that would've contributed to a real royalty payout.
This is a common practice in Hollywood as well. It's the reason why royalties as a percentage of net profits are called 'monkey points'. It's because you'd have to be a monkey to believe that the studio's accountants would ever allow that film to turn a profit in its official books.