Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | rschmitty's commentslogin

Steve jobs (who stole it from Picasso, who took it from ?) said "Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

This was later "clarified" by Bud Tribble: "If you take something and make it your own ... it's your design and that is the dividing line between copying and stealing."

My history teacher in high school had a simple challenge to get an A for the entire year, skipping all tests and quizzes, and free pass to sleep during class: "Give me a 100% unique idea"

Obviously everyone tried and everyone failed. There are no unique ideas, only innovations upon existing and past work of others.

So I find it odd anyone would downvote you for the truth!


>> Steve jobs (who stole it from Picasso, who took it from ?) said "Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

That's faintly ironic -- he had too much shame to steal the quote from Picasso. Perhaps he meant that his company employed shameless great artists, not that he was one himself. Steve Jobs has always struck me as a businessman, primarily (which is probably what you want in a CEO, if you owned, say, Apple stock -- not a thief).


> A different approach to this would be to put more control of these things into the hands of end-users such that they provide the 'backend' into which you (the developer) load your application.

User Dependency Injection!


> It made it impossible for the player to seek certain items. Let’s say you’ve got a good kit of armor except you really could use some high quality boots. How do you fill in that gap?

In many games, believe it or not, is a actually intended. Once certain mobs start dropping certain items, people start camping only those mobs and ignoring everything else causing a large bottle neck for the population (in the case of multiplayer only obviously).

Additionally, say you give a mob 0.01% chance to drop The Sword of a Thousand Truths. And of course everyone wants the The Sword of a Thousand Truths. So every day you go out and farm these kobolds until your fingers are numb rather than exploring the world.

Finally, by providing a clear path to getting what you want, you will likely max out sooner and stop playing until the next content patch, which in turn means less revenue for your game


What does this have to do with a single-player roguelike? I can sort of see

> of course everyone wants the The Sword of a Thousand Truths. So every day you go out and farm these kobolds until your fingers are numb rather than exploring the world

but playing for such a duration is already a massive design failure.


In most of the roguelikes I've played mobs don't continuously respawn like that anyway. If you stay in a dungeon too long, either they'll be no more mobs and you'll starve, or higher level mobs will randomly start popping in.


> people start camping only those mobs and ignoring everything else

The mobs should not be concentrated so much in one area, spread them around, mix it up so one area has a ton of different mobs.

Very few games do this though.


Would also love to know where the money went specifically. Seems insane (also do you need another website built for 200k?)


Already answered this, but I'll comment because you bothered to. Sure :) We're basicly two founders that have done most of the design and project management of the site. In addition, we've outsourced some design and all of the programming to Ukraine, including the mobile version. The outsourced development itself runs into the 100k's over the stretch of 1.5 years, and in addition, we've done some marketing (40-50k) and had some administrative costs (lawyers, offices, etc.). I don't have an exact sum, but it's anywhere from 190-220k.

I'm a designer and previous developer myself, but the site is actually quite broad. There is a lot more than meets the eye, such as: - an administration area - caching and indexing mechanisms - web scraping robots - various other agents and robots to update user feeds, top lists, etc. - algorithms to calculate relevance and weight for the items on each list - Wordpress plugins, possibility to embed lists, etc. ...and so forth. It's a pretty big site.


It's funny to see many people giving their "expert" opinion about how expensive your web site was, just by looking the design. It is very easy to say when: 1. You are not the one developing the site, thus You have no commitment. 2. You ignore all the other project requirements (already mentioned above) just by looking to the presentation layer.

If the project was too expensive, blame also the founders , which may have asked for a MVP bigger then the necessary.


Sure, but from the looks of things this is a pretty generic web site. If you have been doing development for a while that figure would be an instant red flag. Not blaming either party.

The 'additional' requirements that were listed to justify this such as administration area, caching layer, feeds, etc are really basic items.

So unless they wrote their own web server I don't see any issues with flagging this.

For all you know that figure could have been made up.


Even with moderate padding; that price tag and time frame is a bit too high, especially if you outsourced this to a team of multiple developers.

Just a general observation, I don't know much about your architecture.


It looks like you're a Norwegian company? Surely Norway has programmers who can handle this at equal or surpassing quality for less money? What was your rationale for outsourcing to begin with?


In Norway a dev starts at $100k a year; or you can pay roughly $250 an hour for freelancers. Labour laws in Norway are very strict, which means hiring someone is a big step. When we first started the project we didn't really foresee how big of a task it would end up as, so we went with outsourcing. If I had to do it again, I probably would have hired one in-house dev.


>In Norway a dev starts at $100k a year; or you can pay roughly $250 an hour for freelancers.

I still think you paid more than the site is worth but... you can get that kind of rate for freelancing PHP? I think I need to move to Norway.


You can definitely get that amount for freelancing PHP in the states.


Either you're joking, or I've wasted my career.


I'm not joking. In the right cities, the high cost of living will pull you that amount.


You and me both, i get 65$ an hour in Sweden.


1 year and that is all they have (and not very diverse) says a lot about the Foundation market.


> The consistency and pattern behind the new icons is well thought out, and the use of subtle lighting effects (the blue and orange undertones) is great art direction

Made me think they copied the current "hot" of colors, just like going flat after everyone else

http://www.slashfilm.com/orangeblue-contrast-in-movie-poster...

It's not that I super dislike it, more than I always thought of apple as a leader instead of follower when it came to design and perhaps I didn't realize how much they lost talent wise.

The only thing I truly don't like is notepad lost its full on yellow 'notepad paper' look. The difference between notepad and pages was very obvious prior, now it is subtle


Notepads are pretty much only yellow in the US. I see that mostly as an internationalisation issue, to be honest. (That said, “folders” also don’t necessarily look that way on many places on Earth besides the US.)


Needs keyboard arrow navigation :)


I agree. It was the first thing I tried to do.


I was more thinking they need to highlight the first character and allow Alt- shortcuts to work...


Ooh good catch!


That was my instinct, too. You would almost need to paginate any page that would normally need scrolling, just so the arrows could work.


TAB and RETURN work.


I enjoy cold showers from time to time. But as someone who just moved in to a new home and forgot to schedule gas turn on in advance leaving us without hot water, a true "ice cold" shower leaves you literally breathless.

I've never felt my body react in such a way.


I can second this. I spent 2 weeks in an apartment with no hot water. The first 30 seconds or so in the shower left me struggling for air. After that, it's a lot better. Not good, but better.


If you stay in it for a while, you still acclimate. Just don't try it during a cold winter.


Because that is a huge fuss to do what practically every other app can easily do by dragging the border, including other windows apps.

Sometimes you need to change your prompt to be a different size and an annoying 5 step thing is a big fuss


[deleted]


He/she is referring to dynamically adjusting the characters size (its line wrap) when resizing the window. You can even resize the command prompt to fullscreen but the lines wrap to 105 characters by default.


That computer is not connected to the internet.


DOS viruses generally didn't spread over the internet. :-)


So I guess what he has to worry about is someone handing him a sketchy floppy disk...


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: