You're right, I hadn't realized that the spec forbade primitives as WeakMap keys - so while to approach should actually work in other languages, in JS it would leak memory as you'd be forced to use a normal map (or clean up after yourself - ich).
Yes, and the self-loathing white male undercurrent runs throughout. The idea that gaming is a solely white male affair is itself a very parochial view. Calling it a male affair is probably reasonable based on the statistics, although that's still already a bit of an insult to some of the successful developers who sell female-dominated genres, but it's not white male; plenty of non-white males play games, and they're already playing different games than the author does. As a single for instance, the word "sports" doesn't seem to appear in that article at all. (Not that sport games are exclusive non-white male; from what I see, they're popular with almost everybody, except "gamers".) As another for instance, Japan has been making and playing video games for as long as the West, and as far as I know, they are not white; again, no trace of the immense and incredibly diverse Japanese industry appears in the article.
You have to throw out a lot of evidence to come to the conclusion that video gaming is even remotely the exclusive domain of "white males".
I'd submit that rather than building games based on your political conception of what other people might want, you'd be far better off bringing in the non-gamers into the design process directly. Or even just letting other groups of people build the types of games they like instead of taking it upon yourself to build the games that somebody else might like, which is already sort of, shall I say, culturally imperialistic? They're doing it already, after all. I know; I've played some of them, and enjoyed them, and they didn't need permission, help, or angst from the "white males" to do it.
The problem may not be "the industry", so much as a game player who doesn't realize that even within the context of gaming as a whole, they are less widely-experienced than they think. If I were to try to entice my wife back into gaming, who plays Mario Kart with the family and a mean Dr. Mario, "Skyrim" would not even make my top 50 suggestions.
The author doesn't want more games for black males, or white women, or even minority women. Though the author may not realize it, that kind of demographics are a red herring.
What she really is looking for is games for what she feels is an under-served demographic: The kind of person who lives in "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation" like her friends do. Her friends just happen to not be white males, so she latched on to that.
I don't feel over-stimulated, so I can only guess that such people would indeed prefer games like Farmville and Neko Atsume.
But the author's friend, in addition to being overwhelmed with constant shock and stimulation, is also a bit of a snob, so she won't play those low-brow games. I don't know what high-brow relaxing games are like. Maybe Papers, Please and Dear Esther?
This project is something that people spent a long time creating, they put in a lot of hard work and they offered it to you for free. They obviously do care a lot about accessiblity, it's evident from their website. If you found a problem with a particular screen reader, did you open a github issue? What was the name of the software? Did you follow all of the accessibility guidelines? Did you engage with the authors and ask them for help? Or did you simply register a new HN account with which to insult and diminish the hard work that these people gave to you in good faith and for free?
Came here to say this, its sad really, quite convenient and I miss the noise of the electric milk float at 4am, always knew that meant it was time to stop coding and go to bed! Depends where you live though, still heard it in Dorset.
I like that the punishment for Man who stole coffee and spanners from Poundland was that he had to stay in court until 5pm that day. Truly that is justice.
> I find it very interesting that commenters from countries where cycling is decidedly unsafe are going to lecture those from countries where the predominant mode of transportation is the bicycle on safe cycling practices
This is exactly the point though. The guidelines that apply in the Netherlands are different to the guidelines in, say, the UK, precisely because the two countries have very different attitudes towards cycling. In the Netherlands you have an environment where cycling is extremely common, motorists are very used to sharing the roads and in fact most motorists are also cyclists themselves. This dramatically reduces the sort of us vs them conflicts between cyclists and motorists that seem so common in other countries. Different types of road user are seen more or less equally and show each other a level of respect that is just about unheard of elsewhere. In such an environment, hogging the lane seems unnecessarily aggressive because you simply don't need to do it.
In the UK, USA and just about everywhere else motorists are simply not used to driving close to cyclists. They don't know how much space to leave, they don't know how to pass them safely, it's actually socially acceptable to be aggressive towards cyclists but most of all, motorists are not on the lookout for cyclists, they are not expecting them. In this kind of environment the cyclist's number one priority is to make themselves seen and that's why being assertive is so important.
If you're in the middle of the lane by default the car behind you might be annoyed but at least they are likely to see you, and when you've been seen you can then move closer to the kerb to allow them to pass you safely. This puts the cyclist in control in a situation where they'd normally be at the mercy of motorists.
Computerised spreadsheets were inevitable, we've been using spreadsheets in some form for thousands of years. Visicalc is recognised as being the first, but Excel has been the dominant product for decades now, for all its warts it has had a massive impact on humanity.
Cool article. I'm the author of https://github.com/codemix/babel-plugin-typecheck mentioned and the next version of the plugin (WIP) takes this kind of approach, so that you can reference a type at runtime:
type User = {name: string, isAdmin: boolean};
// compiles to
const User = t.object(
t.property('name', t.string()),
t.property('isAdmin', t.boolean())
);
// which you can then use with
User.check({name: 'Alice'}); // boolean
User.assert({nom: false}); // throws
Ultimately it should be possible to use this to implement pattern matching in JS based on flow types, for example:
type User = {
name: string;
roles: Role[];
};
type Role = {
id: number;
name: string;
users: User[]
};
const url = match(someInput,
(user: User) => `/users/${user.name}`,
(role: Role) => `/roles/${role.id}`,
(_) => `/` // default URL
);
The really hard thing is to do this whilst maintaining perfect compatibility with flow.
