IFComp organizer here. Pleased to see some interest in IF and the competition on HN!
I'll take this opportunity to say that the comp's judging period lasts through November 15, and is open to the public; anyone who rates at least five games via the website (at http://ifcomp.org) will have their votes counted.
This is the IFComp's 20th year, and we have 42 new text games for you to play. All of y'all are welcome to come join us!
Ha ha! I clicked on this article's HN comments thinking "Wow, this sounds a company ready for their Incredible Journey to begin." (c.f. http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com) And lo, the most upvoted comments here are all expressing the same sentiment.
I do not recall before today just looking at a new company's elevator pitch and muttering "Best wishes with the acquihire, y'all". Something subtle's shifted in the way we perceive startups, lately...
But the above is just my observations at my own behavior. I do wish the best for this company!
Articles which critique Perl as a whole by focusing on Perl 6 always strike me as a bit strange. As someone who works professionally with Perl every day, and starts several new projects using Moose-centric modern Perl techniques every year, the amount of time I or any of my colleagues spend thinking about Perl 6 is negligible.
The modern Perl movement, as far as I can tell, arose in part from Perl hackers who started to treat the wandering Perl 6 project — rife with neat ideas, if not with release engineering — as a skunkworks for Perl 5 extensions. In the gap between the middle-aughts and 2014 that this writer waves away with “is anyone still paying attention?” due to no Perl 6 release, the active Perl world adopted Moose, and many Perl-based Moose-driven technologies — Catalyst, DBIC, and so on.
These technologies, and the communities around them, have thrived on their own ever since. Nowadays when I think about Perl 6, it is often because I am at a Perl conference and Larry Wall is literally at the podium talking about it and I am like “Well. You go, Larry Wall.”
Perl really has reinvented itself in the last handful of years, at least in the eyes of those who make a living inventing new things with it. I can’t call this writer wrong — their perspective is their own. I suppose I can only learn to appreciate the notion that, to hackerly folks who aren’t as ensconced within the modern Perl community as I, the language is this thing from the 1990s that kicked the bucket through one bad decision in the summer of 2000, leaving behind acres of legacy code that’s still being scraped away.
To be fair: this indeed describes a lot of what I am hired to do. It’s just that I replace it all with newer and better Perl…
Strong agree on there being many places to find clients.
I began my own freelance career by browsing http://jobs.perl.org and responding to the more interesting requests for contract work. That was like 7 years ago; pretty much everything I've done since then has been through referrals.
It's just a question of getting yourself kickstarted. There's plenty of great clients out there who need help, and aren't using crappy lowest-bidder sites (because they care about good work and are willing to pay for it).
Just to clarify: you're providing this data to support the assertion you're replying to, right? Since 36.9% is about triple the proportion of African-Americans among US citizens in general? (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...)
"The world contains things that are objectively worse than the thing that has hurt you, therefore suck it up you crybaby" is neither a particularly valid argument (as it can be applied to nearly everything unfortunate that can happen to a resident of the first world), and honestly won't win you a lot of support either.
Would curiosity be nearly as popular with the public if it didn't have a semi-antrhopomorphic "head" with a "face"? Our far-away pal is as cute as WALL-E.
I wonder about the design intent behind placing its one "eye" on one side of its face, where it seems friendlier, rather than smackdab in the middle where it'd look creepier and more cyclopean.
Consider limiting your use of tools like this (in Letterpress or any other word game) to games you play with friends where both parties agree to a no-holds-barred cheatfest. It makes the game entirely different, as well as giving you a fun way to deploy cheat-tools without actually cheating.
Wandering a bit OT, admittedly, but I feel obliged to push back against this notion. I know you didn't mean it this way, but I see it too often to wave away worse examples of abusive behavior, and it's just not healthy.
The "nicest guy" would not use language like "bitch" or "fag" in comments (to pull the first example I saw in that post's responses), because this implies an assumption that comparing the target to a woman or a gay man should be received as a deeply cutting insult. And this alone acts as enough of a cover for me to judge that book, really.
No, these are in fact rather horrible little people, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were in league with the perps who erased this guy's stuff for teh lulz or whatever.
I recommend BackBlaze to my friends for the simple reason that it's saved my bacon once, after a laptop theft. I'd have lost years of data otherwise. It also helped me give the police information that resulted in my laptop's physical recovery.
As someone exploring the prospect of app sales as a career (working on my third app now, supplementing it with consulting work), I'm quite heartened by this article. There's a tenacious belief within the indie game-dev circles I bump around in that the _only_ way to profit from iOS sales is to win the top-ten lottery and join the 1% this article describes.
But the real story that Addey tells here says that Sturgeon's Law is in full effect in the App Store: if you can make your app _not crap_, if you can rise above the dross that inevitably makes up 80 to 90 percent of any sizable collection of creative work, then people will buy it. And if you're willing to act wisely and keep working at it, always pushing out more quality, care-driven stuff, then you can succeed.