By Steve Yegge

What Would You Do With

Your Own Google?
Issue 17 October 2011

Curator
Lim Cheng Soon

Contributors
Rahul Bijlani
Steve Yegge
Kapil Kale
Purin Phanichphant
Yann Esposito
James OBeirne
Sean Plott

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Contents
FEATURES

06

You Are Not Running Out of Time

By Rahul

13

Bijlani

What Would You Do With Your Own Google

By Steve Yegge

STARTUPS
20

Photo courtesy of O'Reilly Media and James Duncan Davidson.

Dont Burn Bridges

By Kapil kale

DESIGN
22

Design Secrets for Engineers

By Purin Phanichphant

PROGRAMMING
26

Learn Vim Progressively

By Yann Esposito

32

Coding Backwards

By James OBeirne

SPECIAL
35

Competitive Game Design: The Marginal Advantage

By Sean Plott

For links to the posts on Hacker News, visit hackermonthly.com/issue-17. All articles are reprinted with permission of their original author.

FEATURES

You Are Not Running

Out of Time
How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Began Enjoying Infinity
By Rahul Bijlani

Illustration by Olgg (olgg.deviantart.com)

6 FEATURES

political career, Julius

Caesar is said to have wept upon
reading a biography of Alexander the
Great. When asked why, he apparently said,
Do you think I have not just cause to weep,
when I consider that Alexander at my age had
conquered so many nations, and I have all this
time done nothing that is memorable!
This story was seared in my memory when
I read it in high school, because it spoke to my
own search for achievement: I had read that at
seventeen, Bill Gates had already created his
first successful business venture. At the same
age, I hadnt even figured out where to start.
It didnt make me weep, but it did make me
worry.
And so, incredibly, at seventeen, I genuinely
wondered:
arly in his

Was I running out of time?

It seems amusing now but back then I
was deadly serious.

The Game
You know the feeling the feeling of being
left behind in the race for achievement. Of
falling back in the game. For some people, the
game is keeping up with the Joneses: marrying
a good catch, living in a nice house, driving the
right car, having a good job, kids that do well at
school. For others, it is enjoying lifes pleasures:
the best vacations, the most enjoyable parties,
with the most exciting partiers. Then there are
people who are forever pursuing harmony and
peace in their lives, resolving the discordant
threads one by one. And for some the game
is living up to their objective definition of
personal development.
For most, it is a combination with a common
thread: am I moving up in the world at an
acceptable pace, or am I running out of time?
Am I maximizing my potential?

What that quickly meant to me was that

wasting time and opportunities were criminal, with my own potential achievements as
victims that needed to be rescued from the
assault of lost hours and non-productivity. It
meant becoming a workaholic. Bill Gates probably felt that way once. Looking back at his
teenage years and his own obsessive time spent
with computers, he said,
It was hard to tear myself away from a
machine at which I could so unambiguously
demonstrate success.
I thought I was on the right track.

A Moving Target
Ironically, when I started to cross some of my
own personal benchmarks, I discovered that
something was very wrong I kept moving
the goalposts.
One counter-intuitive handicap of playing
the game is that with every step you move
forward, two things happen:
1. You discover that its possible to go further
than you previously knew.
2. The people you are left playing with are
better at the game than people left behind.
In other words, distinguishing yourself from
your peers gets tougher as your definition of
your peer group gets upgraded. It must have
been easy for Bill Gates to stand out at Harvard, not so much in Silicon Valley, where
he has constantly competed with Steve Jobs,
Larry Ellison and others master games-men.

did Bill Gates know he wasnt running

How
out of time to achieve his true potential
when he made his first billion?
Thats why the acceptable pace aspect
of moving up in the world keeps evolving as
you discover greater and greater opportunities. When Bill Gates made his first million,
it probably felt extraordinary to him, a landmark achievement. How about his second?
His 20th? His 100th? How did he know he
wasnt running out of time to achieve his true
potential when he made his first billion? If he
was measuring himself on market domination,
where would he go after 95% market share was
secured?
The questions I had got crazier, but they
seemed logical progressions of understanding
the game. For example, geneticists say that one
in twelve Asian men is descended from Genghis Khan. How did Julius Caesar feel about
not leaving behind his empire to his progeny?
Or Alexander for not having any children at
all? Does that mean Genghis Khan played the
game better? How does that make Bill Gates
feel about marriage and kids? Does it make
sense for him to have a harem, for example?
Would it make sense for me to have one? And
one child showered with attention, or the risk
spread over a couple hundred?
If you keep asking these questions, how
can you not keep moving the goalposts? How
can you not get exhausted, overwhelmed, or
anxious?

8 FEATURES

The Journey
Eventually, I came across a thought from Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In
the story, Pirsig, a young man, goes mountainclimbing with some elderly monks. He
struggles throughout, and eventually gives up,
while the monks easily continue to the peak.
What is apparent is that Pirsig, focused as he is
on the peak, is overwhelmed by the climb, and
continues to lose his desire and strength with
every step. The monks, on the other hand, used
the peak only as a guide to mark the direction
of their climb; they were more focused on the
journey and its enjoyment, and made it to the
top with ease.
This offered a valuable insight. Maybe Bill
Gates doesnt sit and ponder these definitions
of success. Maybe he keeps it simple to
maximize his fortune and have a small, loving
family and simply enjoys programming.
Maybe Alexander simply enjoyed battles,
and Stephen Hawking loves physics. It would
appear that they would still be active in those
pursuits regardless of the relation of their
endeavors to material success.

the game the right way

Playing
isnt good enough. It needs to be
played for the right reason.

This would also suggest that the game, i.e.

maximizing your potential, and what you
can achieve with your time and resources, is
best played if you enjoy the pursuit of your
goals. In other words, if you are journey-based,
rather than destination-driven. Pirsigs monks
probably just liked walking in the mountains,
maybe they were not as wedded to the idea
of standing on a peak as they were to enjoying
nature.
Earlier, to me the game meant maximizing
your time and potential to get somewhere.
Now it means maximizing those things to
enjoy the trip. That would mean that Bill
Gates measure of success is how much he
enjoyed his day, not how much code he wrote,
or how much his businesses expanded.
A revolutionary thought! The point of my
life was to enjoy it to its potential, with goals
to set the direction in which I was headed.
This was my new definition of the game.
And it meant it was impossible to run out
of time, because every day was a brand new
opportunity to play and win.
But that still begged the question: how do
you pick your destination? Doesnt it keep
moving, every time you re-evaluate the meaning of success? The monks had a fixed peak in
the mountains they were climbing, most of us
dont have the luxury.

The Right Question

The answer to these questions occurred to me
somewhat unexpectedly, through the best line
in an otherwise unremarkable movie.
In Wall Street 2, right after he has cheated
his own daughter out of her trust fund,
Gordon Gekko, Hollywoods favorite bad guy,
is confronted by his future son-in-law, who
chastises him for his seemingly slavish devotion
to money. Gordon hears him out, and responds,
You never did get it, did you? Its never been
about the money its about the game!
While the audience shook its head in disapproval, a lifetimes worth of questions were
answered for me in a flash, and I wanted to
jump up and cheer. I had the answer: Gordon
was playing the game exactly right, and thats
why he was exactly wrong!
He wasnt running out of time, and he genuinely enjoyed every day of playing the game.
He didnt even care about the money, which
he made and lost and made back. And yet, he
was unhappy and it was clear that something
was very, very wrong.
What I realized was that playing the game
the right way isnt good enough. It needs to be
played for the right reason: to build something,
to see something grow. Gordon wasnt building anything at all, not even a family, and his
emptiness showed dramatically.

what you want to build and

Ifplayyoutheknow
game to enjoy the journey, you

are probably on your way to the good life.

The Destination
The answer to how you pick the destination:
by asking yourself, what do I want to see grow?
What do I want to build?
Even Bill Gates seems to have an opinion
on this. Im a great believer that any tool that
enhances communication has profound effects
in terms of how people can learn from each
other, and how they can achieve the kind of
freedoms that theyre interested in. And sure
enough, hes been building these tools all his
life. All the money he made doing it? Hes
giving it away. And hes enjoying that process,
too!
Einstein wanted to build a theory that
unified the physics of very large objects, like
planets and the physics of very small objects,
like atoms. Did he complete his project, before
he died? No, but he left a legacy and a foundation for generations of future scientists to keep
building on. I doubt he felt like he had run out
of time.
A couple years ago, Steve Jobs built a phone
that he wanted to see exist, and changed the
world forever. Did he really need the money?
Or the influence? Or the acclaim? Or was he
simply trying to create something, and enjoying the process of seeing his vision come to
life?

10 FEATURES

All of these examples suffered numerous

setbacks as well as many opportunities to retire
early in life, but they chose to keep moving
because of what they wanted to build. If you
know what you want to build and play the
game to enjoy the journey, you are probably on
your way to the good life. All of a sudden, the
am I running out of time? question becomes
meaningless.
Imagine building a house; would you really
want to rush it? Imagine you faced an interruption, perhaps a snowstorm halted construction
for a week. Would it make sense, or even be
safe or wise to continue at the same pace
during the storm? You wouldnt feel bad about
the delay, youd just wait till you could resume.
Or imagine you ran out of funds. Would you
abandon the project because it was running
behind, or would you find a way to continue
in the future? If the foundations were poured
and then you were diverted for a year, would
you consider the construction to have moved
backwards, or merely paused?
Now imagine building a family, or a skill set,
or any object or business. Is it more important
to do it rapidly and compare it to others, or to
build something that will last and bring your
vision to life?

wise man once said,

Ahappiness
is the ultimate currency.
A Recipe For Life
These questions are also why comparisons
dont really make any sense. Julius Caesar
was weeping for all the wrong reasons. Alexander and he had different visions; they were
looking to build different things in different
times. Similarly, it was meaningless for my
seventeen-year-old self to measure myself
against a very different persons desires at a
completely different time and place. In doing
so, I was denying my own dreams, and trying
to live someone elses. I was also assuming
I knew what their dreams were in the first
place. Maybe all Bill Gates was trying to do at
seventeen was impress his high school crush.
Maybe Alexander was trying to live up to the
dreams of his father. The reality is that nobody
will ever know!
Work, spouse, kids, and family are not items
to be checked off a list. They are directly based
on the vision of the life you are trying to build,
and settling based on a clock is merely a guarantee that the vision is being compromised.
On the other hand, realizing what you want to
build, as opposed to solely playing the game,
may dramatically impact the choices you make.

In fact, answering the what do I want

to see grow question impacts all decisions,
from what to do on a Saturday afternoon,
to whether you should move to a different
city for your work. It makes short-term and
long-term destinations clear, and then all that
is left is to play the game, or maximize your
potential, to enjoy the journey of getting there.
It also explains why the Gordon Gekkos and
Julius Caesars of the world, who play the game
just for its own sake, are generally unhappy and
unsuccessful in their own eyes, even though
they appear to be doing everything right.
A wise man once said, happiness is the ultimate currency. The phrase resonated with me,
but the game didnt help me maximize the
currency that mattered most. Now however, at
thirty, I think I have the ultimate business plan,
and nobody is running out of time any time
soon. n
Rahul Bijlani brokers, owns and operates hotels. Hes also
part of a few technology startups, including Spinofix and
YB Intel. He still does a little coding in his spare time.

Reprinted with permission of the original author. First appeared in hn.my/infinity (rahulbijlani.com)

11

12 FEATURES

What Would
You Do With
Your Own
Google

By Steve Yegge

13

m not really a data guy. For the

last four years or so, Ive been working on stuff that I love. I want you to
remember this, though this is really
important: you dont want to put out mediocre
work, and you dont want to feel mediocre
about what youre doing. Surprisingly, we dont
always do this, though.
Right now, I work at Google, and for the last
four years at Google (Ive been there for six
and a half total) Ive been working on compiler
technology, because I had this passion around
developer tools and Ive been working on static
program analysis. So, when you take Googles
source code and you treat it as data, you take
all of the worlds open source code and you
treat it as data, its actually not a very big data
set. Its a couple of dozen terabytes, couple of
hundred terabytes, but its pretty tiny compared to the big data sets at Google.
Ive had scaling problems, but Im not really
a data guy, per se. But, gosh, I work with people
who do have data problems. I have to say, just
in passing, Google is an awesome place to work.
I went to work for Google actually, specifically,
because I think that Google is trying to change
the world, and theyre serious about it. I kind of
thought this when I went there six and a half
years ago. And after six and a half years, Google
is the only one trying to defend net neutrality,
trying to open up China, when nobody else
is I mean that is pretty audacious.
They havent always been successful in their
goals. Theyre really trying to change the world,
but they have big scaling problems. Sometimes
it feels like its their biggest problem. But its
funny, because scaling is sort of a periodic
problem. You need to scale, because youve got
a problem to solve, and then its good enough
for a while, and you can focus on problem
domains. Then it becomes a problem again as
you grow, just like software engineering scaling

14 FEATURES

has been a problem kind of on and off. Were

actually pretty good at it right now, whereas
ten or fifteen years ago, we were building
software systems that we didnt understand.
So, we knew we needed to step back and get
some new abstractions.
Anyway, before I was at Google, I was at
Amazon.com, another company thats trying
to change the world. Jeff Bezos has grand
visions its another company with huge
scaling problems. Now they are also awesome.
Its kind of a different flavor of awesome than
Google. Theyre pretty open about their work
environment being very frugal, because their
vision is to pass savings on to customers, but
I wasnt there for the work environment. I
wouldnt have stayed there six and a half years.
They have great people there, and they have
tremendous scaling problems.
Scaling really is too often the biggest
problem. Why? Because these companies are
fundamentally relational and transactional.
I know what youre thinking. Nobody likes
relational anymore, but they have to make it
scale. And they succeed at it. Google also has
some transactional data. Google uses MySQL
for their ads system, and its really, really hard
to scale, but you can make it happen.
Again, Amazon is a company thats not
mercenary. Theyre trying to make money. And
thats good, because money is the fuel for innovation. But theyre doing it with principle. The
retail thing that Amazon did was sort of like
a means to an end, just like scaling is a means
to an end. Now theyre doing cloud computing. Bezos has got big plans just like Larry and
Sergey. So, what about the rest of us? What are
we doing right now? What are we focused on?

calls them auteurs, but

Hollywood
what they really are is people with

principles who are making money.

Well, I want to look at one of our sister

industries: Hollywood. Its not exactly been a
banner year for them, has it? You might have
noticed all the movies suck this year 28
sequels and comic book movies. Why is this?
Well, we know the reasons. Its human nature.
Its corporate greed, companies being mercenary, taking advantage of consumer apathy. If
we keep paying to go see movies like Scream
4 and Hangover 2 and Transformer 17 and
whatever, then theyll keep making them.
And the same things going on in the game
industry. Game industry has hundreds and
hundreds of titles coming out. Maybe you like
video games, or you have kids who like video
games. You have friends who like video games
and theyre always complaining that there
arent any good games but there are so
many good games! There are talented people
working on them, great animators and great
cinematographers and sound people. Yet most
of the games are pretty bad. Again, its because
people keep paying for them, so people keep
making them.
Yeah, except for these guys. Hollywood
calls them auteurs, but what they really are is
people with principles who are making money.
Either the principles are stretching you a little
bit and making you think about philosophy
and the nature of consciousness while youre
getting entertained, or theyre bringing up
social issues like trashing the world in Wall-E,

or theyre putting some serious history into

their game experience like Rock Star. Whatever it is that theyre passionate about, it really
bleeds through. It shows through in their final
product, and theyre making everyone else look
bad. Theyre also showing that you can still
make a ton of money with principle, and Jeff
Bezos and Steve Jobs fall into this category.
Anybody can have principle.
Bill Gates does today. Hes sort of atoning
for his past sins. Did he have principle when
he was at the helm at Microsoft? No, obviously,
and now he knows well, he probably didnt
need to be that way.
Is social networking principled? What
developer or entrepreneur is not working on
something thats kind of related to a social
network? Seriously. Well, its fun and also obviously makes money. You can make a buck with
cat pictures.
Social networks they have a purpose, and
Facebooks purpose is whatever they make
easiest, because thats what people are going
to do with it. Facebook and Facebook clones,
if anybodys making any of those, are really
good at sharing cat pictures. Now, they can
have secondary benefits to humanity, like for
example, helping out with the information
flow into and out of the Middle East. But thats
not what they were designed for, so thats not
what people are using it for, and it winds up
being crap just like Hollywoods movies.

15

an interesting problem that we

Heres
could be working on, if we were literate:
the Human Genome Project.
So, heres what happens over time. As you
get older, you start getting interested in issues
broader than cat pictures. Im not saying that
youre not interested in socializing anymore.
Obviously, you want to hang out with old
people. But you also get interested in why they
havent cured heart disease yet. As you gain
wealth and if youre not a total mercenary,
then you start getting interested in charity and
helping people who are needy. You start getting
interested in politics and all these other kind of
hard problems, and a lot of them interestingly
are data mining problems.
Well, the problem is, by the time youre old,
its too late. What you want is a time machine,
so you can go back and tell yourself, Hey, man,
if you had studied some math, then you could
probably work on some of the hard problems
like signal processing. Voice recognition is an
important problem, because its an accessibility
thing. Its putting blind people and deaf people
in the same position as us. Natural language
processing: same thing. Genes, viruses, there is
a bunch of problems out there that have the
common characteristic that theyre not just
computing problems. So, theyre a little harder,
because youve got to know a little bit of math,
a little bit of statistics. You dont have to be
Hal Varian. You just have to be fluent. You
have to be literate.

16 FEATURES

Well, heres an interesting problem that

we could be working on, if we were literate.
Have you thought about this project at all?
The Human Genome Project, what is it? The
genome sequence that theyve got now is
the compiled binary to the source code for
the human body, for life, the mechanics of
life. If we had the source code in our hands,
that would be the cure for cancer right there.
Thatd be the cure for all the viruses all of
them. That would keep antibiotics ahead of
bacteria. Innumerable benefits. We know this.
You could also hack things, or grow your own
tattoo! It will be an inflection point in human
history and its a data mining problem.
Now, you may already be good at data
mining. There was a dude sitting next to me at
dinner last night named Jay who was a freaking superhero. He is a thousand times smarter
than I am. I brought up this project, and he
says, Im not really a bio-informatics guy, but
you know and he scribbles on the back of
a napkin how you can set this up: you get a
benevolent billionaire to set up a treatment
system in a third-world country and start
gathering data points, so that you can analyze
the effectiveness of the treatments. What
were trying to do with the compiled binary
is reverse engineer the source code by data
mining it against treatments. If you get that
data set, then were there.

we just focus on scaling,

Ifwere
going to scale up FarmVille.
Its going to be Farm Planet.

Hes like, Yeah, but Im not really a bioinformatics guy. Whats he working on? Cat
pictures. Now he was like a closet superhero.
The dude sitting next to him was wearing a
cape. Im not making this up. All right. He
wasnt even trying to hide his superhero status.
You guys are superheroes, and were all working on, well, crap. Most of us anyway. Now, if
we started focusing on these problems, (I know
it sounds kind of crazy) we would actually
have a chance at solving them.
If we just focus on scaling, were going
to scale up FarmVille. Its going to be Farm
Planet, and Im not saying FarmVille doesnt
have value. Whats needed here is pretty
obvious: its a culture change. We all need to
be auteurs. We need to start buckling down
now and preparing for getting old and getting
interested in medicine and so on. Start studying our math. Start paying attention to data
science. Its not a specialty discipline anymore.
Its a generalist discipline. It should be.
Even at Google, where there are a lot of
people who know a lot about data mining,
its still kind of the haves and the have-nots,
like me, who dont know it. Well, OReilly,
amazingly enough, seems to be actually trying
to change the world with this convention and
with Strata. I mean, theyre actually saying,
Hey, gosh, look data mining, machine learning,
data analysis, math. Well, okay, if we want a
culture change, Ive got a challenge. Ive got

a challenge for OReilly and a challenge for

us. The challenge for OReilly is to publish
a bunch of books on math for programmers,
because OReillys got a formula for making
information accessible. Well, lets go out on a
limb. Lets do physics. Lets do bio-informatics.
Why not? Lets give them two years to publish
these things. Then in that two year period,
after theyve published them all, we will agree
to buy them and read them and prepare ourselves to solve important problems five years
from now two years from now.
Whoa, I meant two seconds. They published
them already. Bioinformatics, PERL Computer
Skills, Mastering PERL for Bioinformatics: an
OReilly bioinformatics book. A lot of these
came out just in the last two or three years. Hey,
I didnt even know they existed, but somethings
going on here. Im kind of reading between the
lines. Im kind of making some educated guesses,
but I know that these books arent selling. So
why are they publishing them? Its
because Tim and his team are trying
to change the world by affecting a
culture change.
So the ball is totally in our
court, and whats the ball doing?
Well, the ball is apparently doing
iPad. This is whats popular right
now on OReillys site. I just
took this screen shot yesterday.
Head First, thats kind of mathy.

17

only one step away from

Youre
solving hard problems, important

problems, world-changing problems.

Obviously, OReilly is principled here, because

if they were just trying to make a buck, theyd
be throwing OSCON iPad wouldnt they?
They would, and they probably talked about it
at length. But no, theyre doing OSCON Data.
So, why dont we just effect a culture change
here? Yeah, Im not saying drop what were
doing right now. I mean, the world needs cat
pictures. But what if we all started studying
data mining and so on? And if you already
know that stuff really well, then shame on
you, because youre only one step away from
solving hard problems, important problems,
world-changing problems. Youve just got to
learn the domain knowledge. You dont need to
learn it overnight.
I did compiler stuff, static program analysis
at Google. I didnt know any of it four years
ago. Nothing. I had a compiler class in school.
Now, Im not like Walter Bright or James
Gosling, but I know compilers pretty well. Im
pretty proficient with them, and I can solve the
problems that I need to solve. Same thing goes
for this.
So, heres the funny thing. I had a mid-life
crisis instantly after writing this. I went, Oh
God, Im not following my own advice. So I
dragged my math books down from upstairs
and put them on the table here, and my wife
and I are having study hour every day from
now on.

18 FEATURES

Moreover, this is part of my mid-life crisis,

and this is going to come as a real shock to
my boss. I had just signed up to work on a cat
picture project. I told everyone I was going to
do it, too, senior VPs and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Im sure you can guess what it was related to. I
officially quit that job on national TV. So, you
might say that Ive got a little bit of skin in this
game. Im going to learn this stuff, so that five
years from now or three years from now,
however long it takes when the systems
are scalable enough to handle the Human
Genome Project (because they are, the thing
practically fits in your pocket) and all of the
other hard problems that we can solve with
data mining, I will be ready. And I hope you
are there with me. n
Steve Yegge is a Staff Software Engineer at Google.
Prior to Google he worked at Amazon.com as a Senior
Software Development Manager. He earned his Computer Science degree from the University of Washington,
and has over twenty years of experience as a software
developer, dev manager, programmer hobbyist and
tech blogger. Steves current interests include language
analysis, GNU Emacs and GNU Lilypond.
Published with permission of the original author.
Originally presented at OSCON Data 2011 [hn.my/oscon].
Photo courtesy of O'Reilly Media and James Duncan Davidson.

STARTUPS

Dont Burn Bridges

A 4-Step Guide to Networking in Silicon Valley
By Kapil kale

etworking in

Silicon

Valley should be the easiest

thing in the world. The
Valley thrives on a free
exchange of new ideas, so people always want
to meet other people who might have interesting ideas or connections. As a result, people
I hardly know introduce me to people they
hardly know. Sometimes I get cold-emailed.
On general principle, and since the numbers
arent currently overwhelming, Ill take any
introduction that comes my way. Most of
the time, Ill go out of my way to help those
people out. Most founders, YCombinator or
not, would do the same.
However, about half of people Im introduced to do something that makes me not
want to help them out. Ive been through
enough of these intro cycles now that Ive
started to discern four distinct patterns. Heres
what they are, and how to avoid them:

20 STARTUPS

Flaking on meetings
Last week, a kind-of acquaintance asked me
for some advice on his fledgling startup, and
wanted to see if Id meet with him to discuss.
I offered to have lunch with him the following
week. That was the last I heard from him.
Radio-silence isnt the worst thing in the
world. Ill still take the meeting in a couple
weeks if the founder does end up getting
back in touch. But Ill be far less likely to help
that person, since hes going to have to really
impress me to make up for my current impression that hes a flake.

 Forgetting to do follow-ups
One of my VC friends introduced me to a
startup that he believed had a lot of potential.
I took a 45 minute call with their main guy,
who seemed full of energy and excited to get
things done. I told him that they should apply
to YCombinator, and offered to mention their
application specifically to a partner to make
sure it got a close look, under the condition that
I could review it first. This is the type of thing I
would have killed for before I was in YC.
Unfortunately, that founder never sent me
his application.
A better networker would have sent me a
draft the next day. Or even politely sent an
email later that night that said We decided
not to apply. Thanks again for the feedback.
But I wont ever recommend this founder for
YC again.

Being transactional
Earlier this year I was introduced to another
founder working on a music startup. Their
team needed help with their YC application,
so I spent 2-3 hours helping them revise and
improve it. After I sent them a last piece of
feedback about their video, I never heard back
from them again.
When I invest time in others, I like to hear
how things go. In this case, I felt used. I have
little interest in helping this founder out again.
For us, we made sure that upon launch we sent
out GiftRockets to people who helped us out.

Im never peeved if someone doesnt write a

thank you note, but Im consistently impressed
when someone does. Thank you notes after
meetings are rare. At GiftRocket, we took a
page out of the Wufoo book and started giving
t-shirts to the people who helped us out. Its
great for our brand, and it lets people know
that we really appreciated their time.
Everyone in the Valley is busy, and Im sure
Ive violated my own rules several times. But
by just being a little bit thoughtful about your
interactions with the people you meet in the
startup scene, you can easily avoid burning
what might be some very important bridges. n
Kapil is a co-founder of GiftRocket [giftrocket.com],
which was in the YCW11 class. He used to be a management consultant, and before that he went to Dartmouth
College and got a degree in Economics.
Reprinted with permission of the original author.
First appeared in hn.my/bridges (giftrocket.com)

Not writing thank you notes

One startup founder cold-emailed me after our
site launched, and asked me a couple questions. After I responded, he sent me a thank
you email for my time. I later took an hourlong call with him to give startup advice. Id be
happy to introduce him to anyone I know. And
Ive never even met the guy.

21

DESIGN

Design Secrets
for Engineers
By Purin Phanichphant

a designer like me, you must

be asked on a regular basis to make
it look pretty. The request can stroke
your designer ego, making you feel
like a design rockstar with super powers to
make this world a more beautiful place. This
is especially true at startups, where you are
one of the few, maybe the only designer there.
However, it can also be really annoying
almost degrading at times. Thoughts like why
the hell cant engineers do this on their own?
Its all common sense always go through my
head. If only engineers knew how to do visual
design, designers would have more time to
focus on cooler, more exciting problems like
future product concepts.
And if you are an engineer, you might
wonder how designers pull off their tricks
(and why theyre in such huge demand right
now). Is it genetic? Do design schools teach
them top secret design tips? Or did they make
a deal with the devil to get designers eyes in
exchange for their souls?
f you are

22 DESIGN

Well, Im here to bring you some good news:

engineers dont need to drink unicorn blood
just to be good at visual design. I am a strong
believer that good design is a highly learnable
skill, like riding a bike, playing a piano, or
learning Spanish. If you practice often enough,
youll become better and better at it, and once
youve got the hang of it, youll never go back.
I can say this because I, too, once sucked at
design. But then I learned a few tips from my
graphic design friends, and a few years later, I
could proudly say that I was a design expert.
Today, I want to share these not-so-secret tips
with you. The first five are more specific to
visual design while the next three are geared
towards interaction design.

 Line things up.

Design the white space.

Good example: beautiful sites and apps usually have

underlying grid behind them.

Bad example: this is what happens when you try to

fill in your white space with information.

This rule is the mother of all graphic design

rules. Unless youre recreating the Mona Lisa
on MS Paint, please line things up. Our brains
just like it better that way. The slightly more
advanced version of lining things up is called
the grid system, which is essentially lining
more things up. Kindergarten kids can do it
and so can you.

When youre in an elevator with 15 other

people, its not so easy to breatheespecially
when someone farts. When you design a layout
or UI, try not to jam too many elements into
a page; it increases the chance of having one
of the elements stink the whole thing up.
Leave some white space for the eye to breathe.
I often find myself designing the space in
between elements, making sure elements arent
too far apart or too close together.

Use designer fonts.

In the design world, there are good fonts and

bad fonts. Good fonts like Gotham, Trade
Gothic Bold Condensed or Garamond please
your eyes and make you feel like youre having
a frosty cold mojito on the beach. Bad fonts, on
the other hand, make us designers cringe and
feel like weve vomited from our eyes. Try to
avoid super default fonts like Impact, Curlz, or
Comic Sans, to name a few. If you must use a
preloaded font, Helvetica and Georgia are two
exceptions theyre classic and restrained
enough to be inoffensive. If you want designer
fonts that play nicely with the web, try Typekit.
Ohand please dont use WordArt. Ever.

Bad example: use these fonts and designers will

make fun of you.

23

 Keep it consistent.
Use no more than two fonts and three colors
in your designs. And keep them consistent
throughout your sketches. Each time something changes, our brain has to go whaaaa?
for a moment before figuring things out, so
lets give our brains a rest and keep things
consistent. Also, lets try not to stretch logos
or images. Imagine if someone took your face
and stretched it horizontally by 5%. Still happy
with the way you look?
Good example: pick a few and run with it.

Keep visual hierarchy in check.

Set priorities and stick to them.

Good example: squint your eyes. What do you see?

Bad example: dont allow this to happen in your

product.

I dont know about you, but when I cook, I

always do a little tasting from time to time to
make sure that my seasoning is on track. When
you design, check yourself from time to time.
Squint your eyes every now and then and look
at the screen. What pops out at you first? What
do you see second? Third? Walk away from the
screen, and then look at it from 10 feet away.
Believe it or not, designers and architects do
this all the time to keep things in perspective
(literally). Its a good way to keep you from
getting lost in little details or adding unnecessary buttons to the screen.

Lets put a help button there just in case

the user is curious whats going on. Ohand
lets make the button look a little more like
a button. And before I forget, can you make
that tab pop a bit more? Sometimes, I wish
there was a robot that would bitchslap the one
asshole in the room who keeps bringing up
corner cases (cases that apply to only one very
specific scenario). Until this bitchslap machine
is built, however, we can get by with a list of
whats important and what isnt, backed by
some data if possible. It will save you time and
energy, and shut that asshole up.

24 DESIGN

 Check the Physicality of the UI.

A lot of what makes a UI successful is how
familiar it seems to users when they first
encounter it. Most users dont have exhaustive
experience with mobile apps, and will assume
that they follow the same rules as the real
world. When youre making design decisions,
ask yourself what sorts of physical analogs each
element has. If the UI was to be re-created in
the real world, would it make sense?
WTF example: imagine your interface lived in a
little box. Try not to make impossible things happen.

Use Keynote.

Best. Prototyping. Tool. Ever.

I love Keynote. I dont know how else I would

have come this far in life without this magical
program that lines things up automatically
and makes it easy to make things look good.
Beyond just making slide decks, Keynote is a
great way to mock up UI flows. Do a quick
web search for Keynote mockup templates
and youll find a number of great starting
points for building good-looking prototype
apps quickly and easily.

And remember to listen to others! Its natural that confidence comes with the thought
that youre right and every one else is wrong.
But just admit it: youre not always right.
Chances are you probably wont become a
design supreme being over night. It takes some
practice and confidence that youll get good at
it. Ira Glass from NPR sums it up pretty well
[hn.my/ira].
Just keep repeating I, too, can be a designer
eventually you will become one. n
Though at different times, hes masqueraded as a Hollywood star, a part-time prince, and a buddhist monk,
Purin has always been a designer at heart. He draws
inspiration from his native Thailand, where fun, play,
and lightheartedness are a way of life. Purins fetish for
mechanisms, buttons, knobs, and displays has led him
to design a number of playful and interactive creations.
And bikes.
Reprinted with permission of the original author.
First appeared in hn.my/secrets (pulse.me)

25

PROGRAMMING

Learn Vim Progressively

By Yann Esposito

ant to learn Vim (the best

text editor known to human
kind) the fastest way possible.
Start by learning the minimum to survive, and
then slowly integrate all tricks.

But before we start, just a warning. Learning

Vim will be painful at first. It will take time.
It will be a lot like playing a musical instrument. Dont expect to be efficient with Vim
in 3 days. In fact it will certainly take at least 2
weeks.

Vim: the 6 Billion Dollar Editor

Better, Stronger, Faster.
Learn Vim and it will be your last text editor.
There is no better text editor I know. Its hard
to learn, but incredible to use.
I suggest you to learn it in 4 steps:
1. Survive
2. Feel comfortable
3. Feel Better, Stronger, Faster
4. Use Vim Superpowers
By the end of this journey, youll become a
Vim superstar.

26 PROGRAMMING

1st Level Survive

1. Install Vim
2. Launch Vim
3. DO NOTHING! Read.
In a standard editor, typing on the keyboard is
enough to write something and see it on the
screen. Not this time. Vim is in Normal mode.
Lets get in Insert mode. Type on the letter i.
You should feel a bit better. You can type
letters like in a standard notepad. To get back
in Normal mode just tap the ESC key.

You know how to switch between Insert and

Normal mode. And now, the list of commands
you can use in Normal mode to survive:

2nd Level Feel Comfortable

You know the commands required for survival.
Its time to learn a few more. I suggest:
Insert mode variations

i Insert mode. Type ESC to return to

Normal mode.

x Delete the char under the cursor

:wq Save and Quit (:w save, :q quit)

dd Delete (and copy) current line

p Paste

a insert after the cursor

o insert a new line after the current one

O insert a new line before the current

one

cw replace from the cursor to the end

the word

Recommended:

hjkl (highly recommended but not manda-

tory) basic cursor move ().

Hint: j looks like a down arrow.

:help <command> Show help about

<command>, you can start using :help

Basic moves

0 go to first column

^ go to first non-blank character of the

line

without anything else.

Only 5 commands. This is very few to start.
Once these commands start to become natural
(may be after 1 full day), you should go on
level 2.
But before, just a little remark on Normal
mode. In standard editors, to copy you have
to use the Ctrl key (Ctrl-c generally). In fact,
when you press Ctrl, it is as if all your keys
change meaning. With Vim in Normal mode, it
is as if your Ctrl key is always being pressed.
A last word about notations:

instead of writing Ctrl-, Ill write <C->.

commands starting with : must end with

<enter>. For example, when I write :q , it
means :q<enter>.

$ go to the end of line

g_ go to the last non-blank character

of line

/pattern search for pattern

Copy/Paste

P paste before, remember p is paste

after current position.

yy copy current line, easier but equivalent to ddP

27

Undo/Redo

Some examples, open a file and type:

u undo

2dd will delete 2 lines

<C-r> redo

3p will paste the text 3 times

100idesu [ESC] will write desu desu

desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
desu desu

. Just after the last command will

write again the 100 desu.

3. Will write 3 desu (and not 300,

Load/Save/Quit/Change File (Buffer)

:e <path/to/file> open

:w save

:saveas <path/to/file> save to

<path/to/file>

:x , ZZ or :wq save and quit (:x only

save if necessary)

:q! quit without saving, also :qa! even

if there are some modified hidden buffers.

:bn (resp. :bp) show next (resp. previous) file (buffer)

Take the time to integrate all of these commands. Once you are done, you should be able
to do everything you can do on other editors.
But until then, it is a bit awkward. Follow me
to the next level and youll see why.

3rd Level Better. Stronger. Faster.

Congratulation on getting this far! We can start
the interesting stuff. At level 3, well only talk
about commands which are compatible with
the old vi.
Better
Lets look at how Vim could help you to
repeat yourself:
1. . (dot) will repeat the last command,
2. N<command> will do the command N
times.

28 PROGRAMMING

how clever).

Stronger
Knowing how to move efficiently with Vim is
very important. Dont skip this section.
1. NG Go to line N
2. gg shortcut for 1G, go to the start of the
file

Faster
Remember about the importance of vi moves?
Here is the reason. Most commands can be
used with the following general format:
<start position><command><end position>

For example : 0y$ means

3. G Go to last line

0 go to the beginning of this line

4. Word moves:

y yank from here

$ up to the end of this line

w go to the start of the following word,

e go to the end of this word.

By default, words are composed of a letter

and an underscore character. Lets call a
WORD a group of letter separated by blank
characters. If you want to consider WORDS,
then just use uppercases:

W go to the start of the following WORD,

E go to the end of this WORD.

We also can do things like ye, yank from

here to the end of the word. But also y2/foo,
yank up to the second occurrence of foo.
But what was true for y (yank), is also true
for d (delete), v (visual select),gU (uppercase),
gu (lowercase), etc

4th Level Vim Superpowers

With all the previous commands you should
feel comfortable using Vim. But now, here are
the killer features. Some of these features were
the reason I started to use Vim.
Move on current line: 0 ^ $ g_ f F t T , ;

Now lets talk about very efficient moves:

% Go to corresponding (, {, [.

* (resp. #) go to next (resp. previous)

occurrence of the word under the cursor

0 go to column 0

^ go to first character on the line

$ go to the last column

g_ go to the last character on the line

fa go to next occurrence of the letter

a on the line. , (resp. ;) will seek for the

next (resp. previous) occurrence.

Believe me, the last three commands are gold.

t, go just before the character ,.

3fa search the 3rd occurrence of a on

this line.

F and T like f and t but backward.

A useful tip is: dt" remove everything

until the ".

29

Zone selection <action>a<object> or

<action>i<object>

These commands can only be used in visual

mode. But they are very powerful. Their main
pattern is:

Select rectangular blocks: <C-v>

Rectangular blocks are very useful for commenting on many lines of code. Typically:
0<C-v><C-d>I-- [ESC]

<action>a<object> and <action>i<object>

^ go to start of the line

Where action can be any action, for example,

d (delete), y (yank), v (select in visual mode).
And object can be: w a word, W a WORD
(extended word), s a sentence, p a paragraph,
and also, natural character such as ", ', ), }, ].

<C-v> Start block selection

<C-d> move down (could also be jjj or

%, etc)

I-- [ESC] write -- to comment on

each line
Suppose the cursor is on the first o of
(map (+) ("foo"))

vi" will select foo.

va" will select "foo"

vi) will select "foo"

va) will select ("foo")

v2i) will select map (+) ("foo")

v2a) will select (map (+) ("foo"))

Note on windows you might have to use <C-q>

instead of <C-v> if your clipboard is not empty.
Completion: <C-n> and <C-p>
In Insert mode, just type the start of a word,
then type <C-p>, and then, magic...
Macros : qa do something q, @a, @@
qa records your actions in the register a. Then
@a will replay the macro saved into the register
a as if you typed it. @@ is a shortcut to replay
the last executed macro.
Example, on a line containing only the
number 1, type this:

qaYp<C-a>q
qa start recording.
Yp duplicate this line.
<C-a> increment the number.
q stop recording.

30 PROGRAMMING

@a write 2 under the 1

@@ write 3 under the 2

Now do 100@@ will create a list of increasing numbers until 103.

Visual selection: v, V, <C-v>

We saw an example with <C-v>. There is also v
and V. Once the selection is made, you can:

J join all lines together.

< (resp. >) indent to the left (resp. to the

right).

= auto indent

Add something at the end of all visually

selected lines:

<C-v>

go to desired line (jjj or <C-d> or /pattern or % etc)

$ go to the end of line

A , write text, ESC

Splits: :split and vsplit.

Here are the main commands, but you should
look at :help split.

Conclusion
That was 90% of commands I use every day.
I suggest you learn no more than one or two
new command per day. After two to three
weeks youll start to feel the power of Vim in
your hands.
Learning Vim is more a matter of training
than plain memorization. Fortunately, Vim
comes with some very good tools and an excellent manual. Run vimtutor until you are familiar
with most basic commands. Also, you should
read this page carefully: :help usr_02.txt.
Then, you will learn about !, folds, registers, the plug-ins, and many other features.
Learn Vim like youd learn piano and all
should be fine. n
Yann Esposito is the author of YPassword. He co-founded
GridPocket and is an active web and iOS developer. He
has a post Ph.D. in Machine Learning. He has written
two research tools: dees & SEDiL.
Reprinted with permission of the original author.
First appeared in hn.my/vimp (yannesposito.com)

:split create a split (:vsplit create a

vertical split)

<C-w><dir> : where dir is any of hjkl or

to change split

<C-w>_ (resp. <C-w>|) : maximize size of

split (resp. vertical split)

<C-w>+ (resp. <C-w>-) : Grow (resp. shrink)

split

31

Coding Backwards
By James OBeirne

Ive wanted to write some

personal finance software. Call me
crazy, but I cant find anything currently
in existence that allows me to project my earnings and expenses, then summarizes the net
effect over a period of time. Basically, I want
to be able to propose a budget to myself and
simulate how it will play out.
So I sat down (as so many programmers
have before me), ready to (almost certainly)
reinvent the wheel, and I began to code. I
wasnt really feeling inspired, though. A good
design wasnt immediately clear to me, so I got
slightly frustrated and stared aimlessly at the
screen awhile.
Until I got an idea.
or a while

32 PROGRAMMING

Quick Flashback
Last winter, I interviewed at a hedge fund
called Two Sigma in New York City. Regrettably, I bombed the interview, but it was a
great experience nonetheless. My first technical interviewer was a guy who looked like he
needed no less than three pots of coffee to
show any sign of human emotion. He asked
me the boilerplate questions about design
patterns and data structures, but afterwards
he asked me to tackle a considerably difficult
data-handling problem in Java. I cracked open
a terminal-based session of vi as he shook his
head and muttered something about why
wasnt I using Eclipse.
Then, to my surprise, he told me to write
out a bunch of class skeletons class names,
method signatures, and attributes. He wanted
me to enumerate the cast of characters that I
was going to be interacting with before I actually
decided how the interactions would go down.
I walked out of the interview knowing I
didnt get the gig, but I was intrigued by this
guys approach.

The Backwards Art of Software Design

Skipping Steps

I reminisced about the Two Sigma episode

yesterday, as I was struggling to get down a
design for my little personal finance Python API.
I decided that Id do the stoic Two Sigma interviewer one better and write out a script using the
yet unwritten API. Id reverse-engineer a good
design by pretending Id already written one!
Ten minutes and a few backspaces later, I
came up with this:

In a few ways, the design I came up with

coding backwards was better than what I originally proposed. Initially, I was going to have
classes like MonthlyIncome andDailyExpense
that mandated an overly complicated inheritance structure to avoid repeating periodicity
code.
When I wrote a script in my fictional API, I
decoupled the transactions and their frequency
of occurrence into two disparate objects
without really thinking about it; instead of my
initial design,

from miser import *

m = Miser("jobeirne")

MonthlyExpense(name = "netflix",
amount = 14.);

g = Goal(amount = 16e3, # $16,000

by = Date(2012, 8, 1))
# by Aug. 1, 2012

I now had
Expense(name = "netflix",
amount = 14.,
on = MonthlyRecurring(15))

m.attachGoal(g)
bills = [Expense(name = "MATH315
tuition",

amount = 1.3e3,
on = Date(2011, 8, 29)),
Expense(name = "netflix",
amount = 14.,
on = MonthlyRecur-

ring(15))] # 15th day of the month

income = [Income(name = "phase2",

which makes for a way more reasonable class

tree (goodbye, multiple inheritances).
I was surprised at how satisfying the experiment was. A better design quickly appeared
when I forced myself to preemptively eat my
own dog food. Instead of shoehorning use-cases
into a class structure Id already designed, I
coded backwards and the opposite happened: a
design evolved from daydreaming about an API
that Id like using.

amount = 1.5e3,
on = MonthlyRecurring(7,
22))]
m.attachExpenses(bills)
m.attachIncome(income)
print(m.summary(fromdt = Date(2011, 8,
20),
todt = Date(2012, 9, 1)))

33

Paint by Numbers

Conclusion & Buzzword Bingo

Now that I had written out an interface I liked,

development was simple: I started out with
skeleton classes and then filled them out so as
to match their behavior in the example usage I
had written.
The process was straightforward, though I
had to put some thought into how the classes
would be structured internally. As I fleshed
out the classes, I noticed a few ways I could
improve upon the API I had come up with, so
I made a few minor changes to the example
usage. This iterative back-and-forth continued
throughout development.

Clearly, this technique is inspired by test-driven

development, and for all I know it may be old
news to experienced programmers. Nonetheless, I found using it to be a fun experiment
and a nice addition to my utility belt.
There is no silver bullet for development
methodology. Coding backwards, or interfacedriven development, certainly wont solve
all your problems. It is, though, a quick and
gratifying way to help writers block and gain
some clarity when you sit down to write an
API. n

Snags
My experiment wasnt without a catch; since
this method of coding backwards is about as
top-down as you can get, I fell into the pitfall
of doing a ton of development without actually
running the code to test correctness.
This, of course, led to a long bout of debugging at the end, which was a slight pain, especially since Im so used to rapid prototyping.
Maybe if I had test-driven the filling out of the
classes, things wouldve gone down smoother.
The project was so small that it wasnt a big
deal, but I can see how my approach wouldnt
have scaled to something much larger. Im
usually a big fan of bottom-up development,
but coding backwards put me in a mindset that
made that a little less straightforward.

34 PROGRAMMING

James OBeirne is a web developer living in Alexandria, VA. He works at Phase2 Technology, where he
crafts robust web applications for clients in publishing
and government sectors. Previously, James worked
at the National Institute of Standards and Technology developing an open-source scientific computing
framework, FiPy.
Reprinted with permission of the original author.
First appeared in hn.my/backwards (jameso.be)

SPECIAL

Competitive Game Design:

The Marginal Advantage

By Sean Plott

recently was involved in a Mancala

competition, where the entrants had to
code an artificial intelligence program
that could play Mancala. It taught me
an important lesson about competitive game
design.
Mancala is a game in which the winner is
the player who captures more stones than his
opponent. Thus the winner of the competition
was the entrant whose AI program bested all
others in stone capture. One of the coders
devised a computer program that would
maximize the number of stones captured in
a given turn. Throughout the tournament, he
steamrolled his opponents, repeatedly winning
by fifteen stone margins and instilling fear and
despair in the hearts of other coders. However,
his program ultimately lost in the finals by
0-2, and lost each of those games by exactly
one stone. In fact, I was shocked to hear that
the winning program had consistently won
every game it played by exactly one stone.
How could the first program, which seemed to
terrorize opponents, lose to another program
that could only barely squeak out a victory
each time?

The results were explained by subtle differences in their approaches to game play. The
first player wrote a greedy program, one that
would gobble up as many stones as possible.
The coder reasonably theorized that maximizing the number of stones would maximize his
chances of winning. However, the winning
coder displayed even greater insight into the
game: his goal was to have more stones after
both players had taken a turn. In a sense,
after taking the lead, he chose to maintain
that lead, rather than extend it. For example,
instead of capturing ten stones in a turn, he
would capture four, knowing all the while that
his opponent could only capture three, and
that his lead would thus be extended by one.
In a sense, the first programmers AI was successful in maximizing the number of stones
captured in each turn, it just happened that
this was always one less than the winner.

35

I found this incident to be particularly

intriguing, as it reflects the nature of successful
competitive game design. Ive been involved in
the competitive gaming community since 2001.
Although my primary game is StarCraft, I
have considerable experience with WarCraft 3,
CounterStrike, Marvel vs Capcom 2, and a variety of other games. Despite the fact that these
games function in drastically different ways
and demand completely different skill sets, the
expert players, the players who consistently
win, always share a single commonality: they
play comfortably with a marginal advantage.

Amateur players, on the other hand, try

risky, greedy strategies. In CounterStrike, for
example, it is not unusual for amateurs to dash
out into crowds of enemies trying to pull off
a miraculous string of headshots in order to
eliminate the opposing team. The majority of
the time, this kind of amateur is fragged in a
nanosecond. Expert Counterstrike players, on
the other hand, patiently and carefully pick
off enemies, knowing that such caution and
precision virtually guarantee a win.

The marginal advantage embodies the notion

that one cannot, and should not, try to win
big. In a competitive setting, the strong player
knows that his best opponents are unlikely to
make many exploitable mistakes. As a result, the
strong player knows that he must be content to
play with just the slightest edge, an edge which
is the equivalent to the marginal advantage.
More importantly, a one-sided match ultimately
carries as much weight as an epic struggle. After
all, the match results only in a win or a loss;
there are no degrees of winning. Therefore,
at any given point in a game, the player must
focus on making decisions that minimize his
probability of losing the advantage, rather than
on decisions that maximize his probability
of gaining a greater advantage. In short, it is
much more important to the expert player to
not lose than it is to win big. Consequently, a
regular winner plays to extend his lead in a very
gradual, but very consistent manner.

Moreover, amateurs often have no idea what

to do with a marginal advantage once they gain
one. I have personally watched countless games
of StarCraft in which a player gained a massive lead but later lost the game. An opponent
moves out a large force, and the amateur
annihilates it with ease. At this point, the
amateur has a marginal advantage: he has not
yet won, but his opponent has lost his military
and cannot apply any pressure for some time.
The amateur in this situation will immediately
try to win by launching a counterattack and
will then crumble to a strong defense. Alternatively, the amateur will expand excessively,
overextending his bases to the point where his
defenses are too thinly spread. Such decisions
violate the law of the marginal advantage, as
they allow the opponent to get back into the
game. They erroneously attempt to extend the
lead, as opposed to maintaining it.

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So, whats so special about the marginal

advantage? It might seem that all Ive done
is imply that newbie players take unnecessary risks and experts do not. However, just
as playing for a marginal advantage is the
hallmark of the expert player, the presence of
a potential marginal advantage in a game is the
hallmark of excellent competitive game design.
The Mancala tournament brought this sharply
into focus for me. Building in and allowing
for a marginal advantage leads to exciting and
dynamic play.

Second, a quality competitive game should

have a variety of techniques that can be
employed in order to win. That is, if a player
performs strategy A, the opponent should
have more than one reasonable response as
an option. Games frequently have a system of
built-in counters. Theoretically, game creators
insert such counters to avoid the danger of
an optimal strategy. However, these kinds of
systems often cause games to be nothing more
than a fancy multimedia version of rock-paperscissors: Unit A counters Unit B counters
Unit C counters Unit A. On the other hand,
excellent competitive games, such as Marvel vs

in and allowing for

Building
a marginal advantage leads

to exciting and dynamic play.

Not that providing for a marginal advantage

is the only critical element in competitive
game design. I will concede that all reasonably
designed competitive games share three basic
traits: ambiguity of optimal play, diversity of
play, and allowance for skill.
First, there is no such thing as a good
competitive game that has an obvious optimal
strategy. For example, there is no competitive
tic-tac-toe gaming, as two logical players would
tie every time. I remember playing an old realtime strategy game called KKND, where one of
the units was clearly the strongest unit in the
game. Playing against my brother degenerated
into a fray where we hurled masses of the same
unit at each other until one of us got bored and
stopped playing. On the other hand, a superior
game like StarCraft presents a completely
intractable problem. There is no best race, no
best strategy, and certainly no best way to win.

Capcom 2, allow for huge diversity in response.

In Marvel vs Capcom 2, players can elect three
characters to form a fighting team. With fiftysix characters from which to choose, Marvel
vs Capcom 2 offers over 25,000 combinations
of possible teams, presenting the player with
virtually unlimited options. At the highest level
of play, strong competitive players can be seen
using drastically different teams and styles.

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Third, a good competitive game should test

a players skills and minimize the element of
chance or luck. Ideally, the probability of a
weak player defeating a good player should
be as close to zero as possible. For example,
in a well-designed game like WarCraft 3, it is
highly unlikely that an amateur will be able to
control his units or respond to his opponents
tech patterns as well as an experienced player.
In fact, the best way to test a players skill
in a game is to present the player with more
decisions. In WarCraft 3, a player not only
has to make major decisions, such as which
buildings to make or what hero to choose, but
also has to make innumerable small decisions,
such as how to precisely control each unit or
time an attack. By presenting a player with
more decisions, the game offers amateurs more
opportunities to make mistakes and experts
more opportunities to shine.

However, against this framework of competitive game design, we can understand why the
marginal advantage gives a game flavor and
excitement for both the player and observer.
The marginal advantage not only provides the
player with the joy of overcoming obstacles,
of finding new and more effective methods of
winning, but also allows a player to express
himself, to have his own unique style. By
exploiting the marginal advantage, the expert
player is both a problem solver and an artist.
In WarCraft 3, StarCraft, Marvel vs Capcom2,
and CounterStrike alike, we see the individuality of the players shine through: some play
aggressively, some play defensively; some are
renowned for their solid, steady play, others
for their unorthodox tactics. We respect the
brilliance of their expert skills; we admire
their ability to win. Yet, at the same time, we
appreciate the aesthetic of each players technique, that each player finds a solution that is
so different from the next player. If too many
decisions are clear cut, the player has no need
to discover his own marginal advantage over
the field, and the competitive game collapses
into redundant, unexciting play, unappealing to master and unappealing to watch. The
brilliance of a competitive game is that the
designer must limit his role to be the creator
and balancer, to allow for the potential of innovation. In this way, each player can uncover his
own marginal advantage and become the true
pioneer of the game.
Whenever I encounter some little hitch,
or some of my orbs get out of orbit, nothing
pleases me so much as to make the crooked
straight and crush down uneven places. n
Sean Plott, commonly known as Day[9], is a former
professional Starcraft player and a sportscaster known
for his Day[9] Daily Netcasts at day9.tv
Reprinted with permission of the original author.
First appeared in hn.my/marginal (teamliquid.net)
Photograph by PCU (pcu-stockage.deviantart.com)

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