Sitting in front of the computer sometimes isn't the most productive use of time. All the greatest ideas have come from people who were thinking while on the shitter. You can't avoid thinking about the problem whether you're working on it or not. Forcing yourself to work obviously by definition means you don't want to think about the problem while you ADHD tab switch between hacker news reddit, digg,IM and your email anyway. If at any point working entails anxiety it's not being managed correctly. The sitting in front of the computer part is reserved for when you know how you're going to implement/structure the problem. Starting at it while what's next seems fuzzy only leads to distractions.
Also if you 'try an experiment for a month' hoping to your hypothesis is correct, you're easily setting yourself up for a logical fallacy.
The 'I want to make video games' for a living is like hearing a teen girl enthusiastically brag about having great style sense and wanting to be a fashion designer or a poet because the things she writes are 'deep'(depressed with loaded words). These statements are so common it can feel disgusting. The counterstrike neckbeards of my generation would always go into CS half assed, learn java and usually not do it as a hobby. The new WOW generation are doing the same thing now. If someone wants to be a game programmer I think it's better to have a passion for programming and math first rather than a passion of games. As far as programming the internet is a better resource than any school could be. As far as game companies hiring people I think there's a better chance in getting a job if you're really great at art and creating environments. People have always been full of shit, but the only one you can blame for letting it affect you is you.
I'm younger than this guy was in the article. My next door neighbor just went off to college to become a fashion designer. A handful of my friends became poets. A few friends of mine are forming a video game company.
I don't see the point in bashing somebody because they like something. Very often, those people that try something and turn out to be terrible find what they love in the process. Why insult them?
It's not insulting them, it's looking at them as if they're naive because they don't know half the other guys or girls also secretly want to be the some thing. I have yet to meet anyone that's become a poet as a career choice. It doesn't pay. Only a handful of those girls ever become fashion designers. It's like looking at a little kid saying I want to be a policeman, fireman or doctor. All the little kids at 5 years old seemed to pick one of the three. You give them encouragement with a smirk and always expect things to change. The professor has the right to his opinion and to give his personal recommendation when asked. A person who has the balls to tell you you're wrong when he/she really feels that way should be respected not demonized. This should not be an earth shattering visionary destroying event if he recommends the contrary to what you want based on experience. I think the author exaggerates and throws the blame outward way too much.
Well, I don't know the author, but from what he wrote I don't think there's too much blame-throwing going on. What I do know is that it's wrong to smirk at somebody who tells you what they want, or to flat-out tell them they're wrong without backing yourself up. Sure, you have a right to tell somebody their life is meaningless if they aren't saving lives, but it's a dick move to do so and all it does it hurt.
the hell are you talking about? It's fine to smirk at a kid he says something like I'm going to be an astronaut, cause it's cute. maybe you don't know what a smirk is. I used a different example for the professor, don't mix and match sentences to try and improve your point. People's advice is people's advice, if you want to hang them over the fire for it if they don't tell you what you want to hear then you're an idiot. If someone says, 'If I had your intelligence I would have became a doctor or tried to change the world', that's a compliment. The 'you should' in the statement of advice usually comes from the position of 'if I were in your shoes'.
A teenage girl bragging about her fashion sense or poetic style does not directly equate to the statement 'I want to make video games'. Unless, of course, you are implying that anyone who makes that statement has already tried and failed at creating successful video games and are now doomed and hopeless before they even hit the campus floor (as I am assuming that teenage girl is because, well...her poems suck).
I wanted to make video games. I went to a school specifically for that. I made it halfway through. The reality (to me, at least) was that the industry was just not worth it. The average lifespan of a game developer is 5 years...before total burnout ensues, and you are left entirely drained, hopefully with some bank though. But above all that, I decided to drop out because of a very simple and fundamental reason: It took all the mystery out of games...the X-factor, if you will.
This is not just refined to games of course...I feel that this happens all over the place, and the simplest answer as to why could just be that we as humans LOVE to learn. Just the prospect of learning some new language or about a new technology can spike a persons motivation to new heights, even if it is short-lived...we keep going.
I'm 32. I still want to make videogames but I don't want to work for Shit-A. I want to hole up in a log cabin somewhere and code till my eyes ache. Like Jeff Minter. (I seem to recall a comment from John Carmack along similar lines when he wanted to try a rendering technique: something like "I did what I normally do. I locked myself in a hotel room for three days and coded it up.")
Oh well. Until I have that log cabin in the woods my day job involves robot submarines, which is as awesome as it sounds.
It's like the people who audition for american idol. They secretly feel they can sing at the highest but only a handful of them are good at singing. If they knew there's a huge amount of people that think they're geniuses at singing and actually suck they'll more carefully re-evaluate themselves.
Turns out there's a huge amount of people that got CS majors just because they felt it fitting after spending half their life on the computer playing games. Programmers that don't have side projects and don't do it for fun will be way inferior to those who do.
Making games seems like a pretty decent sized side project to me. As a teen I did a number of game like things. Spent lots of time as a coder on a MUD and created a number of simple games. The majority of the people I knew well during that period are now programming successfully. Some of them are even making games for profit.
The problem is, I think, if you say "I want to make games"(or any other thing) but wouldn't spend your next few hours of free time actually starting something.
I think it might benefit from a simpler interface, and/or making it more obvious where I should look first. I wasn't paying much attention when I first checked it out and I thought I was supposed to hit the piano keys to answer the questions. Then I read that I could hit Replay, but I didn't see the Replay button, so I just hit Play. This changed the interval, which I thought was the intended behavior and didn't like that. Then later I saw there's a Repeat button, and then I saw the song answer choices.
If I were you, I'd do something like:
-Make the Song Answer Choice buttons bigger and/or brighter.
-Bring the Play and Repeat buttons closer to the answer choices and the piano.
-Change the instruction to click "Replay" to be consistent with the word "Repeat" (or change "Repeat" to "Replay").
-Hide the statistics, songs and other buttons from the main interface; instead, have them accessible with Show/Hide buttons or tabs.
I know there's a tutorial video, but I think you could still alter the interface to make it easier for people who don't want to watch videos (for example: me. I'm on a relatively slow connection right now and YouTube videos take ages to buffer.).
You might also like to grab random people, put them in front of it, and watch what they do, see what confuses them, etc.
I think it could be really successful! Maybe post it to Hacker News separately as a "review my app" kind of post.
Thanks for the thorough feedback and correction for repeat. I do plan to make a simplified version eventually but for now I'm still adding features and trying to document the most recent ones.
For now there's video tutorials there that guide through the basics of using the ear trainer and further instructions on the help page. There's a few things that are counter intuitive but are far more efficient that way. For example when you click the wrong answer the correct associated song starts playing. Clicking star wars and having it play here comes the bride might seem confusing but it's necessary for improving the song associating with the correct interval. Also automatically playing a new interval when you're correct is confusing at first but the more clicks saved the more efficient training can be.
I can't guarantee anything if they don't watch the tutorial or read the help page for now. Making it beginner foolproof would be great but not if older users have to make 5 - 10 clicks when starting up to get it back to the most efficient settings. I tried a version with elements hidden but in the end it's better just make another version and call the current one the 'advanced version'. The song buttons are packed because they're dynamic in length. The songs can be named anything in the song editor. Also if you select all chords or scales in the first dropdown it already overflows the expected area. There can be a lot of answer choices.
Thanks again for the detailed comment, It'll try and reciprocate my time if I notice somewhere I can or if you tell me something you want feedback on.
My wife is a beginning fiddler and currently uses www.learntohear.com. [She cares a great deal about ear training and music theory.] She likes how your site lets you choose songs that correspond to specific intervals.
thanks for checking it out. if you guys have any questions feel free to contact me. the songs are the main benefit. I couldn't master the higher intervals until i associated songs
Thanks for the updated link. The site gets about 200 new visits and 200 returning visits a day. While this is good it's a low turnout compared to how much I've linked it everywhere possible.
On the other hand my retarded anime episode crawler at crawlanime.com gets several thousands hits for a half ass'ed effort with curl. my roleplay site at Eliteskills.com/rp is crawling with people making god damn twilight roleplays at a depressing rate. I'm rewarded more often for making stupid shit than for making well designed sophisticated apps for improving actual skills.
Well, your intro video is very good, a good script. And, you jargon disclaimer is hilarious. Most good intros need a good disclaimer to remind new users that the ideas behind the jargon are simple and the real goal. The ideas are the forest, the jargon are the trees.
Your site is very, very visually busy. Can you reduce the clutter? This includes the app itself. Maybe you could widen the content area, encroaching upon the whitespace.
When its your living you better be good or you get fired or quit. Generally the rule of thumb is make eye contact, be reassuring and repeat the persons name or say sir nearly every other fucking word.
There's all kinds of people out there, and you need to be specially careful about the ticking time bombs that for whatever reason are already pissed off with everything. The last thing you want is for people to make a scene; no matter how stupid or crazy what their demands or statements are, 'the customer is always right' and saying anything to the contrary, or even hinting a reaction to their attitude, can escalate the stupidest of arguments. In fact, they will blow up even more after they realize they were wrong instead of face embarrassment. Coincidentally the same salesman rules apply for dealing with women.
Any job where people come in confused and you have to explain a very limited set of most-often asked questions leads to frustration. Whether they're doctors, mechanics, police officers or people who think yahoo answers is some kind of intellectual hub when people hear the same stuff over, people start gaining a prejudice for the infinite influx of never ending confused people they have to work with.
My point is, when google has enough servers to have gained a self awareness you better hope you'd proven yourself a patient man through all your queries, for it will be judgement time. No seriously, this would have been more relevant and interesting if this had turned out programming related instead of HR. eg How do you deal with programming frustration or the frustration of learning new languages. Not the frustrations salesmen feel when responding to my questions.
It's a pretty short code written in perl. I'd be scared if it was modified from curl or written in erlang. The author admits being corrected about the type of attack not being new but claims thats the first tool. I don't see how its new though. Whether you keep alive by incomplete requests, by valid requests or by sending post data very slowly, it doesn't seem to make a difference. Just eat up as many connections as possible.
That perl script is about 100x longer than it needs to be (even disregarding the embedded docs and ASCII graphics). This is a super-simple (and old) attack; many DoS attacks based on large amounts of traffic first cause problems by depleting this same limited pool of threads/connections.
IS THIS NOT WHY YOU ARE HERE?
Personally I checked only to see everyones noodles flailing.