Solves problem of being out at a group dinner and figuring out how much you owe the one person who inevitably put their card down. Take a photo of your receipt, it digitizes it in seconds, and gives a link to text to your friends/acquaintances. They open, click what they ordered, it proportionally adds tax and tip. No APP required, nor an account. That would be friction.
I didn't make the connection until now, but Jim Keller was on the Lex Fridman podcast twice [1, 2] and it was awesome. In terms of founders this is pretty great team.
$ curl https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33052985 | grep -A10 'tldr'
jderick 4 hours ago | prev | next [–]
tldr:
"So you're saying the best way of figuring out what's inside someone else's mind is to ask them?"
"That's right."
Agreed about Roblox!! Started (unintentionally) teaching myself how to program on Roblox when I was 9, and turned it into a career! Making games encompasses so many areas of programming/creation. Even beyond programming (back end, front end, UI), music composition, sound effects, animation, design, game design.. and share it all with your friends. Alternatively, a simple engine like Love2D (which also happens to be Lua)
Saying something absurd isn’t automatically a joke that I am expected to get. This is humor on the same level as typing the N word in all caps or just lying. It’s not funny, it’s not clever.
pro·lif·ic (adj)
marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity
It's just a fun title for his article about programmatically creating millions of remixes, thus becoming a very prolific DJ. That's the entire joke. It doesn't seem equivalent to "typing the N word in all caps." I'm sorry that your sense of humor is simply too refined to understand us uneducated peasants' jokes.
Also you really just made a throwaway to insult someone's article?
bro you have no place to talk to tell people to “go back to Reddit” after posting that comment. “like typing the N word in all caps” what on earth are you even talking about?
Outside of the joke - I'd say your own definition of prolific undermines you pretty hard there.
While I respect the author for the goal here, I would say he was neither abundantly inventive nor productive.
His inventiveness boiled down to taking an existing concept, and saving some disk space using an already known algorithm. To boot - his method of saving that space rendered the original intent (preventing copywrite of melodies) useless, and was already considered by the original group.
His productivity was a single morning's work, creating a single album, which is just random noise and will never be meaningfully listened to even a single time.
I'm not going to begrudge him the usage in the title, and I think it's a fun weekend project, but I also think it's pretty clearly clickbait (which is fine!).
Purely playing devil's advocate here - Keep reading that definition you pulled up!
"There are many different definitions of productivity (including those that are not defined as ratios of output to input) and the choice among them depends on the purpose of the productivity measurement and/or data availability."
So really what we're arguing about is the "purpose of the productivity measurement". I don't think "number of melodies that will never be listened to" is a particularly good measure for "DJ", but it is a great measure for a blog title.
This % includes cost of all game server hosting, databases, memory stores, etc. even with millions of concurrents, app store fees, etc. All included in that number. Developer gets effectively pure profit for the sole cost of programming/designing a great game. Taught me how to program, & changed my entire future. Disclosure: My game is one of most popular on the platform.
And that's a reasonable decision for an adult to make, and if they were targeting an adult developer community.
I don't think anyone objects to adults making that choice over say, using Unity or Unreal, and targeting other platforms.
In practice, explaining to my son who is growing into an avid developer why I won't a) help him build on Roblox, or b) fund his objectives of advertising and promoting his work in Roblox (by spending Roblox company scrip) on the platform has necessitated helping him to learn and understand what exploitation means and how to recognize it.
It's a learning experience for him, and a challenging issue for me as a technically proficient and financially literate parent who actually owns and run businesses related to intellectual property. It's got to be much more painful for parents who lack in any of those three areas.
Are you really suggesting that Roblox's cut should be lower purely because the target market is children? Why? If anything, the fact that a kid can code a game in a high-level environment and immediately start making money—without any of the normal challenges of setting up infrastructure, let alone marketing and discovery—is amazing, and a feat for which Roblox should definitely be rewarded.
In any case, what's the alternative? To teach your son how to build the game from scratch in Unity, spin up a server infrastructure that won't crumble with more than a few concurrent players (not to mention the cash required for this), figure out distribution, and then actually get people to find and play the game? That seems quite unreasonable for most children/parents.
If this were easy, a competitor would have come in and offered the same service with significantly lower fees.
Yes, I agree that the deception is a problem, although I admit I'm not well versed in the issue. (I'm watching the documentary linked elsewhere now.) But the original claim was that they were exploiting young developers by taking a big cut of revenues, which I disagree with.
> And that's a reasonable decision for an adult to make, and if they were targeting an adult developer community.
If it's a reasonable decision for an adult to make because the trade-offs might be worth it, doesn't that mean that it would also be reasonable for a child to make the same decision for the same reason?
It's either exploitative or it isn't, the age of the developer doesn't alter the trade-offs involved.
Western society says that some decisions are only able to be made by people who are old enough. If you think about other decisions like gambling at a casino, joining the army or purchasing alcohol, then it might help you understand where they're coming from.
Very cool, the Jailbreak creator! Do such popular games earn enough to be able to retire? (although you wouldn't actually retire, since working is more fun)
As one of the top developers on the platform (& 22 y/o, taught myself how to program through Roblox, ~13 years ago), I can say that it seems a majority of us in the developer community are quite unhappy with the image this video portrays. We love Roblox.
I'm never really sure how I feel about Geohot. I know for sure I liked people like him a lot more when I was younger and thought that everything was within close reach.
I hope that he keeps on winning... maybe it will inspire youngsters to try the impossible before reality knocks the wind out of them.
Solves problem of being out at a group dinner and figuring out how much you owe the one person who inevitably put their card down. Take a photo of your receipt, it digitizes it in seconds, and gives a link to text to your friends/acquaintances. They open, click what they ordered, it proportionally adds tax and tip. No APP required, nor an account. That would be friction.