To expand on Magic being "hackable": The game is this way because every rule of the game can be changed by a card. There are no set in stone rules in the sense that they will always apply the same way no matter the gamestate - there are cards that say "You can't win the game" or "End the turn", "Skip the upkeep phase", etc. The game isn't just about playing by the rules effectively, it's also about changing the rules effectively and dealing with how your opponent is doing the same. I think a related reason the game exploded is the fact that design (deckbuilding) is an integral part. Having a hackable game is great, but if the hackableness is random it's not that exciting. It's when you can design an exploit (deck) and improve on it that it gets really exciting.
To me, the main reason Magic is fun is the variety of skills and approaches it encourages. You can play it as several different resource management games: there are at least 4 important resources to manage (time, mana, cards, life) and you can win by focus on getting one or more of these resources more or by preventing your opponent from having/using any resources, and all of those decisions have major impacts on your play and deckbuilding style. You can also play it as a game of assembling your crazy exploit of the rules fast enough to win (combo decks), or you might even be able to exploit the rules so hard you're essentially playing a different game from your opponent, so you have a completely different win condition to achieve (legacy Dredge).
I'd agree, but they certainly know what they're talking about so I don't really mind. They obviously did some form of software development at Nvidia if only as an intern.
Right, he's also worked as a game developer, has been a moderator on GameDev.Net for many many years, and lead the SlimDx project to implement one of the only remaining DirectX libraries for .Net. He knows what he is talking about.
Sen no Rikyu, a tea-master, wished to hang a flower basket on a column. he asked a carpenter to help him, directing the man to place it a little higher or lower, to the right or left, until he had found exactly the right spot. "That's the place," said Sen no Rikyu finally.
The carpenter, to test the master, marked the spot and then pretended he had forgotten. Was this the place? "Was this the place, perhaps?" the carpenter kept asking, pointing to various places on the column.
But so accurate was the tea-master's sense of proportion that it was not until the carpenter reached the identical spot again that its location was approved.
For future reference, when you're pasting something long into an HN comment add a blank line and two spaces before it so it doesn't make the page massively wide:
This was a great article, but the "This site uses cookies" warning struck me as a little disingenuous. It seems like there's a choice to not accept cookies, but if you click "Decline" it just kicks you out to Google. It's nice that they ask but the options really should be "Accept" or "Leave". Maybe this is standard, I usually just ignore those things.
Session cookies require no notice. Only persistent cookies and 3rd party cookies require notice, and there are no features on this site that should require them (besides remembering an affirmative response to the cookie warning). In fact there are no features that should require any cookies, save them for logged in users.
It's mostly an academic issue at this point -- European governments seem to have realised that this law is very poorly written and even the governments seem to have little interest in either following it themselves or having the relevant authorities enforce it.
That said, I think you're mischaracterising what the letter of the law says. It's not session cookies that are exempt, it's (paraphrased, read at your own risk) cookies that are essential for the normal operation of the site. In practice this probably means session cookies for things like logging in or shopping basket contents, but that's coincidental.
Laws are judged by their effect, not their intent.
Prohibition didn't intend to create organized crime, but that was certainly an effect of it, and that effect influences whether or not it was good law.
> the "This site uses cookies" warning struck me as a little disingenuous. It seems like there's a choice to not accept cookies, but if you click "Decline" it just kicks you out to Google.
With JavaScript and cookies blocked, the site worked fine. I never saw a warning.
I think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much. When there's a post that says "we solved this problem", a lot of people here (me included) think "great, what's the next problem to solve". The focus is on "the next problem to solve" more than the "great", sometimes to the degree that the "great" is completely ignored. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it can get grating. It reminds me a lot of a part of the essay "How to ask questions the smart way"[0] by Eric Raymond:
> Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give offence. Rather, it's the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy
It's not quite the same, but it comes from the same cut-through-the-bullshit attitude.
> Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give offence. Rather, it's the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy
With all due respect to ESR, and speaking as an autistic person who has struggled with socialization, I get tired of people trying to paint their failure to grasp basic social principles as a virtue. Behaving like an efficient robot is useful when dealing with machines, but other people are not machines and treating them as such does not improve productivity even if you think it ought to.
A couple of jobs back, I met with a supervisor to proudly tell him that a gigantic, exhausting project I'd been working on for the last nine months was finally ready to deploy. His response, almost verbatim, was "Cool. Here's what I need you to do next..." I found it nearly impossible to care about what he wanted for the rest of my time there. 60 seconds' worth of interest and congratulations would have gotten dozens of hours of extra productivity out of me.
Sorry, that got awfully off-topic. It's just a hot button with me.
Unlikely. HNers are wide-eyed Utopians in the Platonic fashion of believing in virtue through central planning. There is no cynicism here to be found, but in the downvoted comments.
> I think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much.
Possibly, but there are a couple more factors.
1) In the general population, criticism is still the norm. The default reaction to any change is neutral to negative. If any response is made, chances are it will be negative.
2) On HN, vacuous responses are discouraged. And since substantive positive responses are hard to make (most of the positive spin usually ends up in the article, not in responses), positive responses in general are uncommon. Comparatively, substantive negative responses are easier to make, not least because it's almost always easier to see a problem than to see a solution.
Either one of those would push the responses towards negative criticism. Combined with yours, you now have three not-insignificant forces. There are probably more. There probably aren't many forces pushing towards positive response, and demonstrably not enough to balance the scales.
I don't know - I think in order to properly recognize and understand the difference between achievements and failures the community should at least give some credit and also give itself a small pat on the back for achievements such as this.
If you never know what success looks like, you're always failing.
Wether you're right or not, I've noticed that a common clickbait title strategy is to make sure that the title is technically correct. In this case, a higher ld50 would mean weed is "safer" in the sense that it's harder to overdose. But it's already nearly impossible to OD on weed so that doesn't really mean much, and it certainly isn't what the title implies. This way, when you read it and the article is different than the title it almost feels like your fault for interpreting the title in the wrong manner instead of theirs for push an article about something few people care about.
I like this idea, but if you decide to go ahead and make it a regular thing you should indicate that it's a repost somehow, or maybe have an "Editors Pick" tab with the chosen stories.
We've bounced the first idea around for a while but I am loth to disrupt the look of the front page. Your second suggestion, though, sounds like it might solve the problem. Thanks!
I'd like to emphasize that our long-term intention is to have the community manage all of this.
Be careful with Editors Pick. It can be great, or it could be the death of the site. Slashdot, for example. I like the way the community works, especially its diversity.
I noticed it's changed now, so for histories sake the title I was responding to was "How a Snowdenista hid the leaker in a Russian airport" or something very close to that.
