Hacker News Reader

dsirijuson Open Source Game Clones

Then you upvote! Like I did!

dsirijuson Open Source Game Clones

Now this might sound like a rude and blunt answer but it's true - it's because most of those other engines suck.

This is coming from game dev trenches. :)

dsirijuson Open Source Game Clones

I still listen to Terry S. Taylor's soundtrack to it on basically a regular basis.

dsirijuson Ferguson or Iraq? Photos Unmask the Militarization of America's Police

Just one shot in the air usually does the trick. This ain't a video game.

dsirijuson Salmon Cannon Fires 40 Fish a Minute

It's a good thing to get out of your comfort zone every once in a while.

dsirijuson A Reminder To Investors

Good that you haven't caught on any actual argument I've provided, but a casual non-offensive joke.

Please continue traversing irrelevant nodes.

dsirijuson A Reminder To Investors

Worked for Hefner.

dsirijuson A Reminder To Investors

Then we disagree at a fairly fundamental philosophical level. And that's perfectly fine.

dsirijuson A Reminder To Investors

I'm actually pro this blanket cover, but I just see it as band-aid with pretty unclear non-business related consequences.

As for you argument, I'm considering looks an asset to be employed alongside intellect, presentation/communication skills. I mean, I wouldn't want to live in a business enviroment where we're assigned numbers as our names, modulate our voices to sound the same, and use same unisex avatars in a VR-powered business conference all the time. Would you? That would alleviate all possible business-related concerns of yours.

dsirijuson A Reminder To Investors

You're not listening. It's not happening ocassionally. It's one of the major drivers of relationship genesis. You may knee-jerk deny it and be inappropriate in your response as much as you want.

dsirijuson A Reminder To Investors

Not insignificant, but major amount of relationships and subsequent marriages have sprung from flirts and advances at work, obviously frequently including power-disbalanced positions. [1]

While this particular (and pretty stringent at that) declaration of code of conduct is probably conducive to business and PR goals of YC, I'm far from convinced it will be advancing health of relationships between individuals concerned.

[1] http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdeta...

dsirijuson Getting rid of burnout permanently

> there were times when I got completely burnt out as often as once every few days

Hm, maybe we call two different things a burnout. I had it twice, one ending in a visit to ER, the other one blasting a single song at max volume for 20h then crying and trying to quit my job.

I don't think the author actually had one, at least not by my definition of it.

That aside, my main cause of burnouts was working extremely hard on something and not finishing it, for a long time. Or always going after a moving target. Management and goal setting issue, really, and easy one to solve - break huge goals into subgoals, or even - don't have big goals at all.

dsirijuson University of Wisconsin to reprise controversial monkey studies

Well, a committee of scientists that know better than you think results will be worthwhile and disagree.

I'll take their word over uneducated ethical argument. I apologize for being presumptuous about your occupation and field of research.

dsirijuson Ask HN: What do you do to blow off steam?

I played/sang in a garage band and smashed a lot of cheap guitars during sessions.

Nothing beats shouting your ass off for few hours then smashing the guitar on a peak of an adrenaline surge.

Genre matters.

dsirijuson #Love: Virtually No Sex

One of my favorites too, even though I disagree with seeing both Orwell's and Huxley's visions of future as some kind of dead end.

It's hard for me to imagine something like that lasting for more than 2 generations. Quite contrary, I'm seeing it as a possible catalyst for radical change to something quite positive.

dsirijuson How every smartphone platform gets the alarm clock wrong

No. But you need to be able to state that all the smartphone platforms get it wrong.

dsirijuson How every smartphone platform gets the alarm clock wrong

Discussion is a bit baseless without actual data saying whether most people prefer to snooze or dismiss alarm first.

dsirijuson British rocket scientist says he's designed a better saucepan

Am I mistaken or, at [1], it can be noticed that a lot of heat goes into handle?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lKvb...

dsirijuson Ask HN: Why would you disable JavaScript?

Depends on what you're building, I guess.

For particulary security sensitive areas, like banking web software, I'd very much appreciate it working with JS disabled, since I take particular care on security when visiting those (updated, secured, sandboxed OS within VM, not used for anything else).

dsirijuson ASA Adjudication on EA Dungeon Keeper

This presentation works better, as it looks like a feature, not a "hack". Also, I don't really agree that winning players are neccesarily happy players. We took special care for bots to match very closely player's skill level so it leads to intense games, instead of wins.

dsirijuson ASA Adjudication on EA Dungeon Keeper

I was tempted to make a similar game infrastructure design decision recently, namely, faking players in game highly dependant on reaching critical volume of players, in attempt to alleviate problem of players waiting too long for their next opponent.

I, of course, said 'no' to myself, and then tried to work around it, and [some technical difficulties ommited] we now have awesome feature presented as Special Encounter where players play against NPCs, but still weighed similarly to plays against real players.

Being plain evil is easy way out, with higher risk assigned to those decisions. But somewhere in the problem-solution space, there's an ethical solution begging to be found, frequently better performant than the obvious evil one.

Unrelated, how long did it took you to fold a company? It's a lengthy and painful process here, even if you're profitable and without debts to anyone.

dsirijuson SSH Tricks

Sometimes, if we have a lot of SSH keys in our ~/.ssh directory

No, that's not how it's supposed to work. Ideally, one key per machine per user.

dsirijuson Foursquare, Quora, Path: What Becomes Of The Underachievers?

The whole social thing about Foursquare is it's weakest point. I don't know why they are emphasizing it so much. Firstly, only an extremely small subset of my friends are on Foursquare and secondly I have enough social networks.

No it's not. For most people (on whose crowd-sourced data they live on) main motivation to checking in somewhere is pure narcissism and showing off. Nothing more.

dsirijuson Material world: how Google discovered what software is made of

After reading this morning about it, going out, then getting back and reading about it again, I still literally don't have a clue what they're talking about.

dsirijuson Be Nice Or Leave

"We know that some of the most successful entrepreneurs in tech have been difficult individuals who did what they had to do to get ahead.",

"We know that a lot of investors, VCs included, will do what is required to make a buck.",

"It's conventional wisdom that being nice is a bad idea",

followed by a singular anecdotal data point arguing otherwise. I'd posit that it depends on the actual business domain. Some are cutthroat and being nice is gonna be a world of pain for you. I'm not doing dry flower arrangements myself, so I wouldn't know. But in my domain (games) being nice bit me on my ass as much as being mean (if that's even an antonym to nice) did.

So, in conclusion, it's a perpetual dilemma, not one-size-fit-all.

EDIT:

The whole article is a bit disingenuous imho. Title might as well be paraphrased as "Be nice or I'm gonna be mean".

Another food for thought - etymology of nice is from Latin nescius, meaning ignorant.

dsirijuson Linode has a $10 plan

And as easy as that, we all switch. Ain't this wonderful?

dsirijuson Goals Gone Wild: Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting (2009)

Eating raw potato worked too. Eastern Europe, not so long time ago. :)

dsirijuson Goals Gone Wild: Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting (2009)

Agreed on all points, and I'd like to add some numbers that worked for me - keep about 5-10 long-term objectives. Make one of them taking care of your health (exercise, nutrition), one taking care of your mental health (mostly work/rest/socialize balance), and invest in your knowledge/skills. Currently, I have 5 more (finish project #1, #2, #3, make company profitable, move out of country).

Additional point I'd like to make is - know thyself. You simply cannot set goals on some wishful thinking and other randomnesses. While glass of wine per day is ok, you might better be off without any, or you might need a bottle of wine a day to manage your cholesterol level (stretching the metaphore).

Also, props for planning out the next day in evening - makes sleep and the start of next day so much more pleasurable experience.

dsirijuson When He Was A Young Man In Alabama, Tim Cook Stumbled Upon A KKK Cross Burning

And, with that question directed to Tim, that particular investor did more damage to brand than he realized. Later that night, he silently weeped in his pillow, realizing the irony of his mistake. A "show me the money!" nightmare soon followed.

dsirijuson Why Game Developers Keep Getting Laid Off

Yeah, I'm divorcing personal stuff from company before public game release announcements. :)

Thanks for your interest and notification though.

Your profile information link is 502-ing. http://www.hackernewsers.com/users/wlievens.html