HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

thebigshane

847 karma · joined July 22, 2008

shaneAToharaspaceDOTcom
submissionscomments
thebigshane··on Using Deno as my game engine
Why not make this a web/browser game?

I don't feel like the author explained why such focus on being a downloadable game. Just nostalgia or because they want it included in Steam? With a web ui, why not make this a web game?

I absolutely loved the original SimCity and SC2000. The focus on creation, management, and simulation was always more fun to me than the graphics.

This game looks like so much fun as well and eager to give it a try.

thebigshane··on Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
sounds like the new Microsoft Loop product/service announced a few days ago

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/2...

thebigshane··on macOS Catalina 10.15.5
Catalina has been fine for me (old macbook and a new iMac), but I do miss some of the old Steam games that no longer work with Catalina (was it a 64-bit thing?).

Is Steam or Apple going to offer some kind of virtualization thing to allow this old apps/games to run? Or did we really just lose these forever without using your own virtualization (VMWare etc)?

(Or is there some news about this that I just missed?)

thebigshane··on Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
```It is a genuine source of hilarity to me that “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” is a potentially really useful popcultural-reference shorthand for “a situation where two groups face a difficulty communicating because one group speaks exclusively in memes and popculture references”```

-- https://twitter.com/venatrixlunaris/status/11852863701068595...

thebigshane··on Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned
isn't this a problem? https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf/blob/master/convertp...
thebigshane··on Age Reduction Breakthrough?
Agreed. I think. It is interesting how much difference in meaning the space in "a part of" vs "apart of" makes.
thebigshane··on Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
Of course its a better idea to pick the version that sounds better. That's what I said; I know both are accurate.

My point is that by tying performance to environmental factors, you get a boost when things are great but then can have troubles when things are not great. Anyone familiar with solar panels already knows this, but if the correlation is obscured, it could be surprising. The article didn't mention a specific performance gain, but if we say you get an X% performance gain when the sun is out, it also means you get a similar X% performance loss when the sun is not out. Users of the system will get used to the improvement, which becomes the new standard, and then a particularly dreary season comes in with weeks of cloud cover, and suddenly there is concern about the degradation of service.

(Like I said, it's still a good idea, it's efficient use of resources, but the PR is funny, that's all.)

thebigshane··on Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5
First of all, great demo, and great showcase for this technology. I think it did a great job of showing its strengths to traditionally backend developers like me.

I also appreciated the twitter analogy. I just couldn't help but think "Wait, Twitter doesn't have 'Update/Edit Post'!" :)

I've heard that Blazor in the .net world has similar goals to LiveView, but I haven't gotten into it much. Can anyone confirm?

thebigshane··on Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
Good idea, but I can't help but see this as marketing spin over the alternative title of the same story

"Google: Data centers now perform LESS when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing"

thebigshane··on Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)
Do you recall the name of the book?
thebigshane··on List of Twitter mute words for your timeline
If you’re referring to my use of “toxicity” I definitely don’t mean that. In fact I support the crazier subreddits (you know which I mean).

And I agree it gets way overused by many. And maybe toxicity is a stretch for reddit front page but I think you still know what I’m talking about: the shallow, mindless/hivemind garbage. It brings down everything and everyone else to primal attitudes and people go straight for the shock value in order to get internet points.

thebigshane··on List of Twitter mute words for your timeline
It sounds like the common reply regarding Reddit quality and toxicity as well.

   Don't visit the front pages, stay in the curated sub-reddits.
I think it is good advice but the low-quality and the toxicity of the front/main pages still inevitably ends up bleeding into the smaller channels.

And the fault is still on Reddit/Twitter themselves because they aren't/can't ever de-emphasize those main top-level channels, as that's their main audience and so that's where they make money in advertising.

thebigshane··on Every classic Half-Life game is now free on Steam
I play HL1/HL2 every 4 years or so since they came out. I still haven't finished HL2 Episode 2 though :(

I can't find anything about "Community Edition of Half-Life 2", what is that?

EDIT: Maybe you mean "HL2 Update"? ... https://www.polygon.com/2015/3/27/8302337/half-life-2-update...

There is also the "HL2 Cinematic Mod" but that looks ridiculous (pretty much a scantily dressed Alyx) ... https://crappygames.miraheze.org/wiki/FakeFactory%27s_Cinema...

thebigshane··on Haters
Someone mentioned their surprised at the negativity in this essay. I agree, Paul’s frustration is coming through which is new to me as a long time reader of his. It got me thinking of the recent article [0] the other day about someone analyzing Facebook’s latest PR, with Sandberg, Boz, and Zuckerberg seemingly speaking out a little more “off the cuff” as usual, as if they’ve been letting their frustration get the best of them and speaking publicly about ongoing events when it’d be “better” to say nothing at all. Perhaps this is one of those cases, but seeing as how Paul likes writing about what can’t/shouldn’t be said, maybe I’m not so surprised. And actually I liked this essay anyway :)

But it reminded me that Paul usually thanks people who review his essay drafts at the end.

This one was no exception, but I noticed a couple new names:

Peter Thiel, and Christine Ford.

From the Kavanaugh drama[1]? It looks like yes.

[0]: https://themargins.substack.com/p/facebooks-pr-feels-broken

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Blasey_Ford

thebigshane··on For suicide prevention, try raising the minimum wage, research suggests
I dunno. They say that about boats, much bigger than jet skis.[0]

Jet Skis are pretty easy to load/unload and store compared to a bigger boat. Also much easier to maintain, most of the jet skis I've ridden have all been small 2-stroke engines. Bigger than a lawn mower engine, but not as powerful as most motorcycle engines (except for the bigger wave runners, those are 4-stroke motorcycle engines). Like a go-cart engine. Yes, they require maintenance, but also probably the simplest engine you could possibly maintain.

[0]: https://www.myboatlife.com/2010/12/two-best-days-of-boaters-...

thebigshane··on Open Source, SaaS and Monetization
I think that is what Armin was looking for as well, but couldn't find anything that quite did that so settled on the BSL instead (probably because determining what fork qualifies as competing or not seems hard). BSL seems close, but seems to disallow any commercial usage (IANAL!)?
thebigshane··on Evaluating State and Local Business Tax Incentives [pdf]
I see that the abstract doesn't say "no evidence". Did anyone download the full paper to see if "no evidence" was quoted there?
thebigshane··on For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate
Forgot to note that, the money wasn't "missing" in the sense that it disappeared. It was definitely spent, over many projects, over many years. The problem he was trying to point out was that the auditing and tracking is poor and it is difficult to retroactively see where it was spent. I'm not trying to downplay it too much, because it obviously was (and IS) a huge problem. But there wasn't any implication of nefariousness or intentional fraud. (Caveat: There may have been smaller cases of fraud to make up that number, but the $2.3trillion itself wasn't implied to be all fraud).

It wasn't "wait, wtf happened to all this money? >:( ".

It was more "ah crap, we didn't do a good job tracking all this money... :*("

The nuance is subtle and easily hand-waved away by truthers, but such is politics.

thebigshane··on For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate
Yes, Rumsfeld did make this speech on the day before the attacks. It's actually a great speech too! He talks about the cumulative bureaucratic waste of the previous few years of the Department of Defense, and poor auditing.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4623026/donald-rumsfeld-speec...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/

https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-missing-3-trillion-dolla...

But the section of the Pentagon that was hit was not the "accounting wing". There is (and was) no "accounting wing". The specific areas that were hit were mostly "Naval Command Center" and "Defense Intelligence Agency", but even then, the area was relatively unoccupied due to renovations that started in 1998.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FirstFloor_Pentagon_Bodie...

https://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/images/pent...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_77#Cr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon#September_11,_200...

thebigshane··on Have Online Reviews Lost All Value?

    describing tradeoffs that would seem reasonable to most people
Sounds like "Mission Accomplished" to me!

https://xkcd.com/810/

(Transcript...)

Cueball: Spammers are breaking traditional Captchas with AI, so I've built a new system. It asks users to rate a slate of comments as "Constructive" or "Not constructive."

Cueball: Then it has them reply with comments of their own, which are later rated by other users.

Megan: But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?

Cueball: Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.

(from https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/810:_Constructive)

thebigshane··on Integrating Microsoft and LinkedIn
"recruit"

It isn't that hard :)

thebigshane··on How Windows Everywhere finally happened
pjmlp seems to be an expert in a lot of this stuff but I'll throw in one other perspective: if you need to write a native app on Windows, yes, UWP is the way to go, certainly over MVC, WinForms and WPF. But it is tied to Windows...

I doubt the performance improvements are significantly different. It's really about portability (Windows Store) and latest Windows features (start menu, menu bar, Cortana, ink, touch, high dpi)

Also, I hear if you do have an exiting WinForms/WPF app, you should be able to upgrade it to UWP.

thebigshane··on How Windows Everywhere finally happened
I think you might be underestimating just how aligned Windows 10 is across these devices, certainly more than Android vs ChromeOS is. (Then again, from what I hear, ChromeOS is starting to creep more toward Android... So maybe that is changing). This is more than a shared stripped-down kernel.
thebigshane··on How Windows Everywhere finally happened
Windows has had a sufficient built-in virus/malware scanner for a while now. But, I agree, it's now as easy of a target as other Windows 10 machines out there.
thebigshane··on Our software must get better
Really interesting perspective. In this example, external competition created a worse product than if they were left as a stagnating monopoly?
thebigshane··on Microsoft Announces Converter for Bringing Win32 Apps to the Windows Store
Wait... what? Do you have a source for that? I can't find anything in my searches to confirm that. I did see various EULAs saying you can't redistribute some bits included with some of the MSDN products (like MSDN documentation and sample Jet DB files) with your product, if your product is primarily a general word processor, database, or spreadsheet application. But nothing like you can't write one of those applications at all.
thebigshane··on Ask HN: Helping a dev who drinks?
While this is probably the "right course of action" (whatever that means), I'd imagine this will surely, eventually lead to him leaving the company one way or another and you can say goodbye to the miraculous hash table implementations.

I'm not throwing my hat on either option, but I am highlighting that this option has consequences you need to be prepared for. (Ok, they both have consequences)

thebigshane··on In Colorado, a look at life after marijuana legalization
I don't think 'jernfrost' is commenting on the possibility for overdose at all. In the context of his comment, he seems to imply that there are just so many choices and flavors, that it can be confusing. Like going to the supermarket grocery store to pick out a new tube of toothpaste, how many variations does there really need to be? How likely will it be that I pick out the best one for my needs?
thebigshane··on In Colorado, a look at life after marijuana legalization
"edibles" is referring to marijuana snacks, stuff you can eat, like brownies, but more typically little candies and gummies.

So the parent comment is saying that all of the variations/flavors of these pot candies can be disorienting.

thebigshane··on Stop Whining About Google Reader
So give it me straight: not satire?

You wrote a post to HN about how those who are complaining about Google Reader (a group you admit is not all programmers) should stop complaining about Google Reader's shutdown because these people could just whip up their own alternative? And you see no other facet of this situation that is worthy of being upset about?

You very successfully just trolled HN. And that wasn't even your intention?

Page 1 of 15Next →