Top all-time · #3601
Mark J. Nelson
Personal blog · kmjn.org · on HN as mjngamesai
Mark J. Nelson writes Mark's Notes, a personal blog at kmjn.org about games and ai. Since 2010, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 154 times, most often “The 'Tapper' videogame patent (2015)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mark J. Nelson's notes on gamification, the decline of Prolog, Wikipedia, and game patents, often as support in discussions. Two commenters point to specific posts as worth reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The 'Tapper' videogame patent (2015)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-08-04
- The convergence of notability and verifiability on Wikipedia3 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2011-02-15
- Why did Prolog lose steam?3 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2010-11-30
- Soviet gamification3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2011-08-09
- This Message Does Not Exist3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-14
- NP-hard problems aren't always hard2 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2010-08-16
- Funsultants, gamification, and work as play2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-09-10
- /snippets/hayek79_minimumincome.html2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-01-25
- Search-oriented tools for Unix-style mail: mu and notmuch2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-12-20
- Cyano-View Copenhagen2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-11-21
What Hacker News says?
Another right-ish supporter was F.A. Hayek, who had some positive arguments in favor of it as well (whereas Friedman supported it mostly just because he thought it was better than welfare systems). Hayek's main argument was that a society based on autonomous individuals, rather than collectivist groups, is more likely if everyone is guaranteed at least a minimum safety net, because otherwise people are forced to cli…
Comment linking /snippets/hayek79_minimumincome.html
on “Unfit for work”Submitted This Message Does Not Exist as a story · 818 points
HN discussionThat's pretty great. I've wanted for a while to find a way to layer image effects onto Google Street View, to be able to move around the world in a sort of alternate processed reality. But afaik, there's no straightfoward way to add a filter like that unless you're Google. There's an image API, but the resolution is only 640x480. There's an undocumented image API with higher-res images, but you'll get banned if you…
Comment linking /projects/cyanocph/
on “Google maps 8bit quest mode. A setup for 4/1 perhaps?”Submitted Weirdly broken Wi-Fi access points as a story · 178 points
HN discussionThe retention rate actually seems relatively low as an absolute percentage, though the way it plateaus is interesting. I did an analysis of the retention of the oldest Slashdot users ( http://www.kmjn.org/notes/early_slashdot_users.html ), and it was much higher: about 70% after 2 years, rather than 30%. Took about 10 years to drop to 30%. Granted, that's for the earliest users, so retention rates are probably (much…
Comment linking /notes/early_slashdot_users.html
on “Hacker News Data Analysis”Submitted Who posts on Hacker News? as a story · 93 points
HN discussionA popular band can, if there are good sources for the information. Regardless of what other policy exists, having written a number of band articles, I've found that to be more or less the one de-facto rule: cite thy sources, preferably to sources that seem relatively legit (musicological books or journal articles good; newspapers and magazines ok; the band's own website ok but not as the only source; "personal commu…
Comment linking /notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html
on “The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia”Submitted Operator precedence by textual substitution as a story · 90 points
HN discussionI put together a set of capsule bios of the top 20 HN contributors, which might be useful background info: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html
Comment linking /notes/hacker_news_posters.html
on “The Several Million Dollar Bug”Submitted The 'Tapper' videogame patent (2015) as a story · 62 points
HN discussionMy first paper as an undergrad measured MIDI round-trip by tapping the input and output MIDI wires and then looking at how the signals were offset: https://www.kmjn.org/publications/MIDI_ICMC04-abstract.html For keyboard input, one paper (whose citation I can't seem to find) used a clicky mechanical keyboard, pointed a mic at the computer, and measured the offset between each corresponding pair of keyboard click and…
Comment linking /publications/MIDI_ICMC04-abstract.html
on “Elk OS – Audio Operating System”Submitted Colons in computer science paper titles (2018) as a story · 40 points
HN discussionEven embedded exponential problems can be fine, since existing solvers in the SAT/SMT/ASP/etc. family working on finite domains like these can usually heuristically solve them in reasonable time. I did some work on formally modeling game mechanics in answer-set programming [1] for a prototyping system a few years ago [2], and in my case model size rather than complexity was almost always the bottleneck. And the bigg…
Comment linking /publications/Ludocore_CIG10-abstract.html
on “Teeny Tiny Mansion: text adventure game formally proven to have no dead ends”Submitted Soviet gamification as a story · 40 points
HN discussionThe assumption needed is even stronger than the complexity-class question: even if you proved integer factorization was not in P, that wouldn't be enough, since you need integer factorization to be almost always hard in every instance of the problem. Or at least you must have some way to identify and exclude the easy-to-solve instances. Example: SAT-solving is NP-complete, but nonetheless heuristic SAT solvers are v…
Comment linking /notes/nphard_not_always_hard.html
on “A non-mathematical explanation of one way functions”Submitted US universities announcing online Fall 2020 as a story · 39 points
HN discussionAlthough this clone is clearly not the case, and I'm not aware any (high profile) cases, it is actually possible to patent the design of a game. There is a very interesting read about a video game patent: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/tapper_videogame_patent.html titled (drum roll) "Video game in which a host image repels ravenous images by serving filled vessels".
Comment linking /notes/tapper_videogame_patent.html
on “OpenSC2K – An Open Source Remake of SimCity 2000”Submitted Advice on how to take a screenshot (1985) as a story · 35 points
HN discussionA few others: Machine Learning (Theory), http://hunch.net/ , is a good place to learn about new machine-learning papers. It doesn't really do research exposition on the blog, but it posts about recent ML conferences, highlighting some of the papers the author finds interesting. Embedded in Academia, http://blog.regehr.org/ , is about 50% personal stuff, but 50% posts on John Regehr's work on C-compiler fuzzing, with…
Comment linking /notes/
on “A set of top Computer Science blogs”Submitted The Tapper videogame patent as a story · 32 points
HN discussionI looked into this a bit for the University of California system, and that did indeed seem to be the issue in that case. Tuition has gone up, but less than state funding has gone down. In other words, the university is getting cheaper to operate on a per-student basis, but nonetheless getting more expensive to attend, because of a large shift in who pays (from taxpayers to students). The historical public funding le…
Comment linking /misc/uc_funding.txt
on “A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe”Submitted Retention of early Slashdot users as a story · 29 points
HN discussion> All the austrian economics fans talking about better price signals as an argument for less regulation - all of them should consider using the same argument for giving an unconditional safety net to the poor. Interestingly, one of the founders of Austrian economics, F.A. Hayek, actually did argue for a minimum income: http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/hayek79_minimumincome.html
Comment linking /snippets/hayek79_minimumincome.html
on “Experiment in paying villagers in India an unconditional basic income”Submitted Mistaken machine translations of 'ribbit' (2018) as a story · 16 points
HN discussionYeah, it definitely had a sort of mobbish feel to it. I've been a Wikipedian since about 2003, been in and out of the meta-circles, and have a mix of positive and negative opinions about how it works (but I think on the whole it's a huge benefit to accessibility of knowledge). So when something like this comes up in a community I'm also part of, I usually try to participate in the discussion. Not even really just to…
Comment linking /notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html
on “Why I stopped travelling to the US and largely stopped doing business in the US”Submitted Operator Precedence by Textual Substitution as a story · 13 points
HN discussionIn the case of the University of California system, it's almost 1:1 substitution, declines in per-student funding being matched by increases in tuition. Partly due to actual cuts to the UC budget since 2000, and partly due to funding not keeping up with increases in student numbers. The state government mandates these increases in student numbers, but in recent years has not been willing to fund accordingly. The man…
Comment linking /misc/uc_funding.txt
on “US Household Debt Surpasses 2008 High”Submitted Colons in computer science paper titles as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI've been interested in this idea of games with modifiable rules on and off, but something about the voting aspect doesn't appeal to me that much. Not entirely sure why. I like the self-referentiality of the rules being modifiable, but it just being a vote, "what rule change do you want?", feels unsatisfying. I'm not sure what to replace it by, admittedly. I did one experiment where instead of saying what the rules…
Comment linking /notes/reflexive_rules.html
on “Nomic”Submitted This Message Does Not Exist as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
