> ”We didn’t have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline.”
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!
The fact that the pitch includes a swipe at Google shutting down services kind of invites the "yeah but are y'all a future acquihire?" counter-skepticism. I think they could probably just have left that whole subject out of the pitch; it's an approach to competing with Gmail via "negative advertising" that I think has relatively little upside and opens up a can of worms. (On the other hand, it's an obvious enough counter-swipe that I'm not sure it's helpful for the entire HN discussion to be about it.)
Indeed. They've inadvertently refocused attention from an otherwise interesting discussion about problems and innovation in Email into one about acquihires and company lifetimes. There's a PR lesson in here folks.
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.
Win me support? My post is why she doesn't win my support. I don't need anyone's support. That's the point really. I don't care if you hate me, and honestly I don't care if you like me either. I don't want your support. The author is exercising her right to post stuff on the Internet. The author is looking for sympathy (I guess? Why would she write it otherwise). She doesn't deserve mine. Surely it's my right.
> The author is looking for sympathy (I guess? Why would she write it otherwise).
You must really not be as smart as you think you are if you can't honestly figure out other reasons for people to share their negative experiences. Hint: spreading awareness, letting people know they're not alone, generating conversation, highlighting things that need to change, ect, ect.
Sorry, but you are wrong, the author wants the thread off hacker news, so she doesn't want to spread awareness. Read her other tweets and you'll see that she doesn't want any kind of negative criticism, she is interested only in positive comments. If you are only interested in reassuring comments, that's called sympathy.
> author wants the thread off hacker news, so she doesn't want to spread awareness.
She posted it on the internet so obviously she does. I don't speak for her but maybe she wants it off of hackernews to avoid the misogynistic trolls that always seem to dwell at the bottom of these threads (that's you btw).
