Hacker News Reader

Depends on the game, I guess. When it's an indie studio crunching to meet a publishing deadline, it's probably happened before.

cdron No Man's Sky: Update 1.03

http://ramiismail.com/2016/08/patch-the-process/

Not weird at all, "big day 1 patch" is very common for anything being distributed on consoles.

cdron Visual Studio Code 1.4

I tried it for python but the pip panel almost immediately soured me on it. Whenever I tried typing something in it, it would lock up the whole program for minutes at a time - absolutely atrocious.

cdron Amazon launches Prime Air, its own dedicated cargo planes to speed delivery

The Amazon Basics items I've seen could be described as "the minimum acceptable". It's better than the typical Chinese junk, but anyone upmarket shouldn't have to worry.

cdron Porting Day of the Tentacle to Linux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjF4eMrYfG0

cdron Why North Korea is a safe haven for birds

Now shorebirds are declining because of overfed geese which we don't shoot enough of.

http://netnebraska.org/article/news/1028942/farmland-buffet-...

cdron Ten years on, revisiting YouTube’s first viral sensation

The reply feature was also being abused by linkbait-type spammers IIRC. Also one of the reasons why they made the video tags hidden.

cdron The Delightful Perversity of Québec's Catholic Swear Words

"Go hang yourself" and "devil" are exclusively British English as far as I know as an American. "Go to hell" is certainly also an American swear though.

cdron This tech eliminates the need for water for air-conditioning of buildings

They are definitely not closed; poorly maintained, the water vapor they output can spread pathogens for miles. Cooling towers were blamed for the recent outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in New York City.

cdron LinkedIn called me a white supremacist because I happen to share a name with one

I'm the only living person with my name, and websites still confuse me with other people. Not only deceased people, but there's also a couple of clueless middle-aged people I've never heard of that used my gmail address to sign up for various websites - my gmail is first initial + last name, and that is not only clearly not unique but also confusing to some older people.

cdron Humble Book Bundle: Hacking Presented by No Starch Press

That's not true at all, if you're including their core PC game business. The vast majority of games they sell come with DRM. Only the Indie bundles are marketed DRM free, and there's only a few of those a year versus many dozens (probably approaching 100?) other bundles a year.

cdron Deepjazz: AI-generated 'jazz'

> But music is emotional and about feelings. The feel of music is most important to us. And I think that a human songwriter is therefore essential, one that cares and puts effort into the work. It connects us, and that is what is important, not the sounds.

Children can play music very emotionally (or rather, in a way that adults associate with emotional) without having any experience of or real comprehension of the emotions. Imitation and training is sufficient to be convincing. A program doesn't need to experience emotion, only know that certain characteristics of the sound are associated with certain emotions.

cdron Namecheap live chat social engineering leads to loss of 2 VPS

MTGOX was purchased as a domain name for a possible MTG exchange, but it never went further than a domain name. There was never even a site.

cdron Namecheap live chat social engineering leads to loss of 2 VPS

Magic Online simulates paper Magic. You buy packs to get cards, each card is its own individual digital object which can be traded and sold, card sets go out of print or have limited runs, and rare promos are released. It even has its own digital currency, "tickets", which are reasonably easily converted to cash.

Magic Online accounts can be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

And at least back when I played, if your account got compromised and all your cards were liquidated, the response from customer support was pretty much "that's too bad, shouldn't have let your account get compromised". I seriously doubt they ever added 2FA or anything either.

cdron Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

Google has nothing to do with it. Nest is a subsidiary of Alphabet, and even then the responsibility is 100% with Nest and not Alphabet. Tony Fadell comes from an Apple pedigree, if we're blaming one of the two.

cdron Sherpa: They Die, We Go Home

> Are the Sherpas better off with the climbers? Perhaps. It's hard to say, because while climbing brings a lot of money, the Sherpas might have moved to cities, to India, or even to America if that opportunity hadn't materialized. Maybe they would have developed some marketable crafts or products? Who knows. Everest is their resource curse.

Sherpas have way, way more access to America than they would if climbing did not draw so many wealthy Americans to Nepal. In the rural American area I'm from Nepalese restaurants (run by Sherpas) are behind only Mexican and maybe Chinese as far as ethnic restaurants, and all because of connections made with climbers.

Some Americans also become interested in the parts of Nepal that don't involve deadly risk and in the Nepalese people. There are architects that take trips to Nepal on their own dime just to volunteer to help improve how buildings are built, engineers that work on better and cheaper stoves, etc.

There are obvious downsides, but there are also upsides.

cdron The Immobile Masses: Why Traffic Is Awful and Public Transit Is Worse

Yeah, things like http://www.rolandus.com/products/v-piano/ are absolutely competitive with acoustic pianos. Multiple acoustic pianos, in fact.

cdron Serious Sam’s Serious Engine source code released

If you're nostalgic, the complete collection of Serious Sam games is US$9.99 until Mar 22: http://store.steampowered.com/sub/17410/

cdron How Imgur Became a Megacommunity

If there's an image host as clean, neat, and fast as imgur I'm not aware of it.

You don't have to interact with the "community" part of it ever if you don't want to.

When using it to view images on reddit, RES loads images inline and you never see imgur at all.

The only time I see the site is when uploading images, and that's extremely slick and fast.

cdron A cheating scandal in the world of professional bridge

There's as many motivations for cheating as there are for anything, though they do tend to fall in broad categories. Some enjoy the thrill of seeing how much they can get away with, some just want to win. Some like to feel smarter than everyone else in the room. Many repeat cheaters are habitual, they have a compulsion and couldn't stop no matter what the consequences were.

cdron Confirmed: CMU Attacked Tor, Was Subpoenaed by Feds

Looks pretty conspicuous to me, and also extremely unlikely to be used for sustained surveillance of a person. Also sounds likely to be discontinued when funding runs out. A load of hot air, in other words.

cdron In Colorado, a look at life after marijuana legalization

That link does not contradict what I wrote. In many (most?) states you must voluntarily submit to a blood test or face the above consequences.

cdron Joe Cool – Why isn’t Trader Joe’s on social media?

> I think this is key. Being "local" is important. I saw this in the comic/gaming shop I volunteered in. We had a web presence and facebook page, but no one used them except for memes and news links. The money was made with people coming into the store and impulse-spending during a Friday Night Magic tournament or RPG sessions. Conversations and real-life interactions with people are why these shops have survived the move to online and big-box outlet stores.

I'm not sure you've thought this through. How are you getting people in to a game shop to spend money? (Or: a game shop is not analogous to Trader Joes.)

10 years ago I ran the Magic events for a large game shop and also the corresponding part of their website. The events mostly ran at break-even to get people into the store to spend money. And the website - specifically the event calendar and email list - was incredibly successful at getting people to come to events.

Game shops should absolutely have as much social media and web presence as possible, tuned towards raising awareness of events. And also possibly raising awareness of their electronic shopfront, if that's something they do - another thing that was a nice extra source of revenue even 10 years ago.

cdron Confirmed: CMU Attacked Tor, Was Subpoenaed by Feds

> To me this makes as much sense as the argument that since a plane carrying people can fly over you, it is perfectly reasonable to put a blimp with an extremely high zoom camera on that spies on your home constantly, detecting not just visible light, but also infrared. Also, since when you talk things vibrate, and since it is possible to view those vibrations though a window, I'm actually broadcasting my speech to the public and thus don't have any expectation of privacy.

I doubt anyone is making that argument; in Kyllo v. United States the Supreme Court held that infrared cameras constituted an unreasonable search. Recording vibrations would also likely fall in the same category.

Police spying on you from a blimp is fairly unlikely, since it would be fairly conspicuous, not to mention expensive. Far more likely they just stick a camera on a utility pole as in the recent United States v. Houston, what you're most likely alluding to. The Sixth Circuit did uphold that tactic, but the law is far from settled there.

cdron In Colorado, a look at life after marijuana legalization

Police already have the authority to draw blood for alcohol-impaired driving. If you refuse, your driver's license is automatically suspended and the refusal can be used against you in court.

cdron Amazon Free Shipping minimum is now $49

Every single time I've had something come damaged from Amazon (which is far too often), it's been from inadequate/incompetent packing on Amazon's part. When you put a 20 lb item loose in a box with a bunch of other fragile items, the carrier is not remotely at fault when everything arrives crushed.

cdron Amazon Free Shipping minimum is now $49

Amazon prices change constantly. Even minute-to-minute sometimes.

At least on most of the stuff I've checked on CamelCamelCamel, Amazon has the lowest price on something maybe one day out of ten. Which is another way they push you towards Prime; if you have Prime, setting a price alert and buying it the day the price is the cheapest on Amazon is simple (assuming you can wait). If you're trying to combine items to get non-Prime free shipping, though, one item might be cheapest but the rest almost certainly won't.

cdron Wizard of the Coast asking fans to scan old books

I don't know about D&D, but Wizards keeps an incredible archive of Magic products. I would also put money on it being TSR that lost things, if in fact things were lost.

cdron News of Nvidia’s Pascal tapeout and silicon is important

The only thing worse than NVIDIA's linux support is AMD's and Intel's. Then again, the issue I had that made me switch to NVIDIA was multimonitor support, which is probably not an issue to the vast majority of people.