mkramlich

for the public record, HBO came back the next day

AFAIK, HBO (here, for me, my provider) had a total visual/sound outage on that day, only, the day that Citizenfour was to debut on air. HBO worked fine every day before. and every day since. I made no changes. and I've seen no explanation for it.

semi-related: Betty From Betelgeuse is the name of one of the main characters in my book series The Dread Space Pirate Richard.

I chose Betelgeuse partly as a nod to HHGG and partly for the way it read and sounded when pronounced aloud. I think of all the star names it is possibly the most beautiful and memorable.

I was not able to correlate that hint with either a correct or incorrect guess. but regardless, please only make such attempts in private via email. ;-)

update: 10:30pm and still the only local cable/public cbannel out is HBO. I'm sure perfectly innocent reason. *cough

EDIT: thank you

haha. fair point.

EDIT: if you think you have my address please email it to me (its in my profile). my opsec is far from perfect, haha, but I doubt its bad enough for you to have found it (that quickly anyway)

its one of the two local dominant ones but I'm not sure which. I'll try to find out tomorrow. I'd say the city but this topic is already terrifying enough considering the nature of the "adversary", haha, oh man. if you email me I'll tell you city. I'm hoping to see reports from others. I find it hard to believe it would just be one person, one device. surely whoever/whatever did this would do an entire region/provider combo, at a minimum

10pm local. checked again. still black and silent. all other channels fine still, showing shows.

HBO here in Colorado was scheduled to show Citizenfour at 7pm local time. At approx 6pm I turned it on to get it ready. Black and silent. Continued black and silent up thru 9pm local when it was supposed to have ended. All other cable TV channels and local/public channels have worked normally during this period that I can tell. HBO worked fine yesterday and every day before for as long as I can remember. Unprecedented black out.

suspicious is saying it mildly. I wanted to post this here and on Reddit for public record in case this is evidence of a censorship attempt by NSA/gov or aligned entity.

I feel like a tin foil hat wearer to even post this but its frightening enough and serious enough that it should be recorded somewhere, as insurance.

Colorado, a dominant provider of local cable TV service, hesitant to say which city. again, all other channels are working normally. and HBO had no similar blackout effect observed by me ever before. so the cause is both unknown and suspicious.

indeed. for the vast majority of people and cases some mix of Google/Wikipedia/Facebook/Craigslist/Amazon/Ebay/Tumblr/WordPress/Reddit/Yahoo/3tc is going to scratch their itch just fine. (to name just a few "big hammer" tools/platforms)

I just googled "Sam Altman" and among the top few links was the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman

I then read that and it answered your question plus extra. i recommend the same technique for most other topics. Very fast, self-serve, great for FAQ-prone facts.

I've made more than that and spread over a longer period of time, and probably at a higher average frequency as well. It definitely helps if its a passion and hobby, not just for money. Though a few of my own were commercial/public and did sell.

this goes double (or half?) for test pilots

simplified cheatsheet: rice, beans, nuts, fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk (for calcium and vitamin D)

prepare in variety of ways. hot or cold. add spices for taste. sometimes meat for protein and iron. walnuts for omega 3 fatty acids which brain needs but body can't produce. eat healthy snacks like washed pre-peeled carrots, etc.

I'd argue this is well-solved, well-known and already well and often communicated.

for example, there are books on this topic. many. anyone can read today.

or just go make that thing

paying customers are the best, most direct validation. and if you keep the cash flow right you may never need investment. most good advice has already been distilled in free web pages and cheap books. build, sell, repeat, scale.

nice! I wrote my first book last year and loved the process and results (The Dread Space Pirate Richard on Amazon). now I have two more books underway in my free time. one is a sequel to that, so fiction. but the other is technical on the topic of software performance and scalability. there are similarities and differences between writing fiction and non-fiction/technical, and I like both.

> How many entities do you know with almost 700bn in the bank ?

quickly tabs over to lookup Apple's balance sheet

nope. but give it another few years. ;-)

note my choice of words "wherever you can get away with it" :-)

because I do take those situations into account. if it would cause a problem with others I don't do it. in my own notes or when dealing with others whose brains I know can handle it, I do.

I hear you. but do what I and some others are doing. wherever you can get away with it put the $ after, as in "10$". let's be the change we wish to see in the world. I also try to express dates in sort-friendly format wherever I can, like "2015 Feb 7" (or 20150207 if computer must parse or align, etc). I also express measurements in metric/SI wherever I can. I also never bought into this whole "put TL;DR at the end" anti-pattern I see some folks doing (assume young) when I can continue to have a "summary: foo" at the beginning, which is clearly better in two particular ways.

one could argue that "10 USD" is even better overall, with the negative of requing two extra chars.

I played indie games in 1981. Making indie games by 1982. Selling my own indie games by late 90's.

so yes this another case of the "kids are so cute, thinking Katy Perry invented rock-and-roll" pattern.

I'm the creator of a Rogue-like game (Dead By Zombie) and love NetHack, consider it one of the masterpieces of game design I've tried to study and learn from. Lessons baked into it both in terms of game design and software. Has a lot of bang per buck, in terms of fun/value per LOC, and per square inch of screen real estate.

If anybody gets introduced to Rogue-like UI for the first time because of this article, and likes it, I also recommend checking out Dwarf Fortress. Similar but very very different in ways that people tend to either love or hate.

The beauty/terror of NetHack is that even if you play with the wiki/spoilers at hand it's still a difficult game to master and win, even survive. YASD and the RNG kill most people, and often.

the code exists on one of my disks somewhere. If you email me your email address I could notify you when I find it and get it usable for you. my email in my profile.

A long time ago (though admittedly in this galaxy) I made a computer game with moral choices a key element in the gameplay. I named it Legacy. It was a Java GUI app. Though a small game in terms of feature set and code size I always remember noticing how it was one of the more fun (to me) games I ever made. Had to do with mating, family and inheritances. It ended up influencing my more recent designs as well.

I once wrote software for a Gilbarco gas station pump, basically a "next gen" model of the kind used by ordinary folks all across the country daily. I too was surprised then by how much Internet related tech we were expected to use and interface with. (I was not the overall architect. And I saw the practical advantages of those choices.)

Let's just say I could smell the security holes.

the FBI's mission is to enforce federal law

what he proposed is more like defense. "cyber" defense. so perhaps better as a different agency or under DOD

I've been designing games, mostly as a hobby but a little bit professionally, for about 30 years. And I love devising text/command interfaces for games. textual representations of the game state. Its a useful design constraint and challenge. it helps me as a designer focus more on making a game fun and interesting. as a bonus it can minimize clutter and unnecessary/accidental complexity. I bias to making game prototypes whenever I can with textual world representations and a command/response messaging-style protocol for playing and interacting with the game. With limited "free" time and a growing need to prioritize, the more bang for my buck I can get, results-wise, the better.

"Yes, we would. And it would be easy to shutdown if it ever became a threat. So don't worry about it."

... said the strangely synthetic voice, associated with a pseudonym that had no profile activity ever before that day.

I had a similar reaction. Maybe because I've been reading for 35+ years and read stuff which is prob much better than The Martian. I see its attractions and his skill, no doubt, but felt lately there's a bit of a hype train going on where the actual material is nowhere near as good as the hype.

Its not as bad as the hype-to-reality gap for Fifty Shades though: that's a book where I couldn't go more than a page or so, every time I've sampled it (partly out of curiousity, partly to study its secrets), without groaning or laughing aloud at how bad it is.

The Martian is much much better than that, but his formula shows its bones quickly.

thanks!

This is on my list to read after being recommended to me directly twice.

As a fellow writer of fiction (The Dread Space Pirate Richard, a sci-fi comedy adventure faerie tale for adults) I was also encouraged to learn that this was another case of an "overnight success" that was years in the making. In an interview with Weir he said that before he started posting his orig blog serialization of The Martian, he already had been writing publically for 10 years and had built up a fanbase of about 1500 subscribers or regular visitors to his blog. So, he had had a big channel of eyeballs ready to go on day one. Even then the serialization didn't explode over night, was a slow grow thing. But a good case can be made that he might never have reached the necessary critical mass of attention for The Martian if he didn't start with that built-in fan channel. Or, it probably would have taken much longer.

Note to self: "I have N years to go. I have N years to go..."

exception: the obituary for the man who created a time travel device.

I agree with the article's arguments. I've been programming since age 10. Doing creative writing almost as long. As an adult ended up doing software engineering as my career. But wrote and published a fiction book two years ago (The Dread Space Pirate Richard, an adventure comedy), close to finishing its sequel (The Man in Black) and also have my first technical book (Software Performance & Scalability) under development. Also written a screenplay and many short stories.

I've found a lot of overlap, in thought process, between programming and writing. Also with music and math. Leverage everything that helps, I think.