Darn, I was hoping for a perspective from the block itself looking down on the already placed blocks.
Second-person tetris then?
[on a side note, I really need to learn how to game the front page. 2 year old, minute twist on 30 year old game -> front page. write a new game from scratch -> dustbin]
Pretty simple, really. (The following is fairly cynical, and a hyperbole. Most of it isn't actually good advice, but I've seen all of these methods work).
Try to post when the post the the bottom of /newest is close to an hour old.
Avoid posting during times of big events (e.g.: not when Google kills off Google Reader).
Have a linkbait title. Don't worry, it gets edited by friendly neighborhood moderators later, so you don't look like a jackass.
Need to re-post an article that didn't gain traction before? Add #SOMETHING to the end of the URL. The matching algorithm will think it's a new link.
Create a voting ring. Make sure to do some actual posting/upvoting, as there is voting ring detection. The simplest prevention is that upvotes from the same IP don't seem to count.
Have a short article, instead of a long one. By my estimate 90% of people upvote based on title alone, 9% upvote based on the first paragraph of the article, and 1% actually reads it.
Post something as "Show HN: please review my X". These seem to gain a lot of favor. Brag about how it was a weekend project, took you 2 hours, etc.
Have high karma and lots of fans.
Post "What I learned from building my tetris clone" article
Talk about how Paleo diet changed your life
Promise to teach us how to stop eating/sleeping/wasting time/driving/having stuff.
Write an article about how your work environment is different and how it makes you productive.
Do something that is otherwise trivial using only CSS. Apply the same approach to Haskell to get a PhD in Computer Science (I literally saw a thesis a while ago about memoization techniques in Haskell.)
Post a short angry rant or make a wild claim. This is especially helpful if you are a mildly popular blogger. Accuse Google/Apple of doing something that will ruin their business. Make a wild prediction about how the Entire Google empire is based on a dozen bloggers using Google Reader.
Thanks for the tips, assuming you're being serious. I tried it again half an hour ago. Chose the time carefully and added a little profanity based on a few posts analyzing HN. No votes at all within the time it was on new and 1 comment complaining about the profanity. Yay.
I'll try again in the morning sometime. Something about spamming the site bothers me. Guess I need to get over it.
It's mostly not serious. Most of the "advice" I gave will decrease the quality of this site, and if it becomes widespread, it will be detected and the community will respond. You can use these tricks to try to game the system, and "spam" HN for your own gain, but I think you can also try to be above this stuff and actually post quality stuff instead. What are you trying to post, and why do you think it's not going through?
P.S.: Another evil technique that may or may not work: flood the /newest page with crap articles, and then put yours at the top. I remember reading an urban legend about a couple of guys that flooded a dating site (OKCupid?) with profiles of gorgeous women, then messaged real women, while other men were messaging the fake profiles. Dilute the market and you might tip the scales in your favor.
Edit: Do you mean? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385857 The game is kind of odd. The way you move is somewhat confusing, though I did figure it out after a second. Having a hard time figuring out what I'm supposed to/can do.
>Edit: Do you mean? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385857 The game is kind of odd. The way you move is somewhat confusing, though I did figure it out after a second. Having a hard time figuring out what I'm supposed to/can do.
Yea, it is a bit odd. The movement is intended to disorient you. You can pick up any items you want and try to use them. You're supposed to make enough movement in the specified direction so you can escape.
Regarding memoization techniques in Haskell, do you have a link? I once tried to implement hashlife in Haskell and got stuck on how to do the memoization and garbage collection. Perhaps I should have just used weak pointers everywhere and relied on the language runtime...
It wouldn't be too hard to implement your 1st person tetris because once you rotate to the left, right and upward, simply paint the user a blank screen because the block can no longer see anything. :D
You could always write a rant about how good stuff doesn't make it to the front page; usually that has a better chance of showing up in the front page than the good stuff itself.
I like Bastet much better than hatetris. Hatetris gave me mostly the same pieces, but bastet was much more varied and actually felt like I was getting somewhere and playing a normal game, except it was deceiving me and forcing me to build up too high, eventually forcing me to lose.
In the end, I got 2 lines in bastet and 3 lines in hatetris :)
Yeah. As I said, I tweaked it. The breakdown for statistics on pieces given is (I believe) in the text. It doesn't give you the worst piece always as that's not fun. Even so, it's still not fun. :)
Take a look at not Tetris 2[1]. From its description:
Not Tetris 2 is the spiritual successor of the classic Tetris mixed with physics. The result is a fun spinoff in which blocks are no longer bound to the usual grid. Blocks can be rotated and placed at any angle, resulting in a complete mess if not careful. And with the newest cutting edge technology, Not tetris 2 allows line clears when the lines are sufficiently filled.
The fact that the orientation of the view changes based on the orientation of the block necessarily precludes this from truly being "first-person Tetris." (Unless the implied viewer can rotate about an axis that is perpendicular to the screen, which seems absurd.) Anyway, I digress.
Very cool indeed, especially because the concept is not something astonishingly complex.
Check out NightMode and Exsistential Crisis
I consider the latter one to be the crown of this concept.
It looks even better and you have to memorize the structures laid, which makes it more interesting (especially since once you've grasped the original idea, the normal mode is not that hard at all)
Ugh, yes. I didn't think I could feel queasy from looking at a computer screen (outside of, say, staring at bad PHP code), but this thing set off my stomach.
yes. I discovered this a few years ago, and used to play it as a break from work - it is fantastic at making you stop after a while because you're so dizzy! :)
Second-person tetris then?
[on a side note, I really need to learn how to game the front page. 2 year old, minute twist on 30 year old game -> front page. write a new game from scratch -> dustbin]