3 ms·

At the risk of being down-voted into oblivion...Other than the fact that the guy selling the games is a programmer, so what? and why is this on HN? There seems

At the risk of being down-voted into oblivion...Other than the fact that the guy selling the games is a programmer, so what? and why is this on HN? There seems to be a rash viral digg/reddit style articles creeping onto the HN front page as of late.

belorn 14y ago
Two reasons: Because his goal/usage of said games, and because complete collections like this is very rare.
sageikosa 14y ago
While not obvious by the headline, the reason for acquiring them was to make bsnes better. The reason for selling them is he's done with what he needed them for on the project.
DanBC 14y ago
Late weekend means different stories make the front page. As other people have mentioned the use of these carts was not to collect (which could lead to interesting discussion about collecting) but to help with programming an precise emulator. There has been previous discussion about that emulator; and about whether it's better to have something that just plays the game or something that exactly models how the games would play on the real hardware / firmware. I'd gently agree that this article isn't interesting to me. But it's more interesting than a bunch of stuff on HN.
martincmartin 14y ago
From the Hacker News Guidelines: 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. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rsheridan6 14y ago
  Yes, but do hackers find this interesting, or are non-hackers voting this to the top? There was a time when you didn't see stuff like this on HN.
  - thesis 14y ago
    While I agree the OP doesn't seem like a great fit for HN... is there a clear and cut definition of "hackers" that should apply to who can post here?
    - rsheridan6 14y ago
      You can play word games looking for precise definitions of anything. I don't have a clear-cut definition of the word "hacker," but in most places it's clear who is or isn't (I'm definitely not at this point in my life, though I might have been five years ago when I registered here). Yeah, there are some edge cases - maybe someone thinks he's a hacker because he runs Gentoo and knows a little shell scripting but people who contribute substantially to open source projects think he's not - but the vast majority of people clearly are or are not hackers. Reddit started out like Hacker News, because it was initially best known for being funded/mentored by Paul Graham, so people who were interested in him went there. It mutated into the Reddit we know today - which is why pg felt the need to fork a new community a year or two into reddit's evolution. HN would probably do the same thing given a laissez faire attitude. It's up to HN to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
  - primitur 14y ago
    It is very interesting because it is a story about the longevity of hardware and software and how, in the end, the decision whether a platform is useful or not is up to the USER and nobody else.
debacle 14y ago
Because the weekend is pretty slow, and programmers need distraction.

belorn 14y ago

Two reasons: Because his goal/usage of said games, and because complete collections like this is very rare.

sageikosa 14y ago

While not obvious by the headline, the reason for acquiring them was to make bsnes better. The reason for selling them is he's done with what he needed them for on the project.

DanBC 14y ago

Late weekend means different stories make the front page. As other people have mentioned the use of these carts was not to collect (which could lead to interesting discussion about collecting) but to help with programming an precise emulator. There has been previous discussion about that emulator; and about whether it's better to have something that just plays the game or something that exactly models how the games would play on the real hardware / firmware. I'd gently agree that this article isn't interesting to me. But it's more interesting than a bunch of stuff on HN.

martincmartin 14y ago

From the Hacker News Guidelines: 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. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rsheridan6 14y ago
Yes, but do hackers find this interesting, or are non-hackers voting this to the top? There was a time when you didn't see stuff like this on HN.
- thesis 14y ago
  While I agree the OP doesn't seem like a great fit for HN... is there a clear and cut definition of "hackers" that should apply to who can post here?
  - rsheridan6 14y ago
    You can play word games looking for precise definitions of anything. I don't have a clear-cut definition of the word "hacker," but in most places it's clear who is or isn't (I'm definitely not at this point in my life, though I might have been five years ago when I registered here). Yeah, there are some edge cases - maybe someone thinks he's a hacker because he runs Gentoo and knows a little shell scripting but people who contribute substantially to open source projects think he's not - but the vast majority of people clearly are or are not hackers. Reddit started out like Hacker News, because it was initially best known for being funded/mentored by Paul Graham, so people who were interested in him went there. It mutated into the Reddit we know today - which is why pg felt the need to fork a new community a year or two into reddit's evolution. HN would probably do the same thing given a laissez faire attitude. It's up to HN to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
- primitur 14y ago
  It is very interesting because it is a story about the longevity of hardware and software and how, in the end, the decision whether a platform is useful or not is up to the USER and nobody else.

debacle 14y ago

Because the weekend is pretty slow, and programmers need distraction.