The cool thing about the article was that I learned about the free video tracking/analysis software. Could be pretty interesting stuff in other contexts.
I have a friend who recently started teaching physics to high school students. I showed him this software, which I found through searching a few weeks ago, and he loved it.
I built an pneumatic cannon to launch tennis balls and rockets etc with my kids and I want to figure out the height and speed of various projectiles and air pressures.
I hate the endless "zomg angry birds is teh best evar" rhetoric.
How is it that one of the most copied game mechanics in Flash gaming gets treated as original?
Raise your hand if you have played 20 different pre-angry-birds catapult destruction games! Worse yet is that it is like an instant implementation with Box2D.
That's what I hoped to see when I clicked in the link; an explanation of the collision model when the bird hits the blocks. The initial parabolic flight is just basic physics.
This type of article on the front page makes me not want to read HN anymore. Yes, it is slightly interesting, but how does this apply to hacking or entrepreneurs at all? It is just a basic physics problem. I fail to see any value added to the HN community.
HN is not just about hacking and entrepreneurs, it's about anything interesting.
I found it mildly interesting, not interesting enough to upvote, but a bit - it had a tip on an interesting piece of software too (Tracker Video analysis). Obviously other people found it a bit more interesting, there's nothing wrong with that.
The title is a bit cheating though, since I thought it was about actual birds, not a game.
There are plenty of places on the internet to find "anything interesting" (see: reddit, digg, youtube). Those places do a great job at wasting time that could otherwise be spent being productive. In other words, those places exist as entertainment portals. There is nothing wrong with that. Entertainment is healthy.
I do not come to Hacker News, however, to waste time. I come to Hacker News for intellectual debate and a deeper form of thinking. Both of these, among others, foster personal growth and learning. That is the value I pull from Hacker News. I'm sure PG would understand where I'm coming from here. So let's keep "anything interesting" to digg. They're doing great so far.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Thanks for looking this up, but I think it's reasonable to note that "anything that good hackers would find interesting" is not necessarily the same as the vague category of "anything interesting".
> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
I agree, but you have to admit that this type of article has alot _MORE_ to do with HN than some of the other crap, errr..stuff that's been posted and subsequently voted up. HN is becoming mainstream very fast.
I think I might be part of the problem. I came to HN accidentally while searching Google for video post-production tips. I normally get my social news fix on digg.com and have used them for the last 5-6 years, slashdot and ntk before it, but recently got fed up with the juvenile comments and the 'Top 10 x' or 'Catz cheeze' type posts. I think Diggs latest v4 has driven their entire readership to reddit, tumblr and also here. So depending on your view, I think HN will continue to get popular and descend further down the LOLCATs route. I would add that I think today this community is great and extremely insightful - speaking as a director of a web services company.
I actually thought that this was interesting and useful ... not very interesting.
It's a partly deconstruction of one of the most succesful mobile games and probably the most succesful iPad game. If you are a Hacker the probability is high you are thinking about iPad games at the moment.
Odd articles like this one together form a coherent picture and might help develop new ideas.
It's an article that you can tell from the title that you (specifically) don't want to read. What's so hard about ignoring it?
Better this than say programmer barbie...
I click on about 1 link in 10 or 20 as it is. It doesn't mean the rest is bad. It just doesn't necessarily interest me. Nothing wrong with that.
Also the fact that something this simple has a fairly simplistic model is of interest and relevance to many entrepreneurs, hence the rank. It's a lesson in not overcomplicating things.
