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elipsey

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Cow Clicker (2010) 4 years ago

In case it's not obvious, this game was intended as satire. Reposting previous comment:

This seems like an appropriate moment to remember Cow Clicker[1], and reflect on it's lesson:

"The player is initially given a pasture with nine slots and a single plain cow, which the player may click once every six hours. Each time the cow is clicked, a point also known as a "click" is awarded; if the player adds friends' cows to their pasture, they also receive clicks added to their scores when the player clicks their own cow. As in other Facebook games, players are encouraged to post announcements to their news feed whenever they click their cow. A virtual currency known as "Mooney" can be bought with Facebook Credits; it can be used to purchase special "premium" cow designs, and the ability to skip the six-hour time limit that must be waited before the cow can be clicked again."

"Unexpectedly to Bogost, Cow Clicker became a viral phenomenon[...]Although continually disturbed by its popularity, Bogost also used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming and social networking trends;"

"'bovine gods' eventually revealed that 'Cowpocalypse' would occur on July 21, 2011 (exactly one year since the original release of the game). From then on, every click made by players would deduct thirty seconds from a countdown clock leading to the Cowpocalypse. However, players could extend the countdown clock by paying to supplicate with Facebook Credits: paying 10 credits would extend the countdown by a single hour, while 4,000 would extend the countdown by an entire month. After $700 worth of extensions, the countdown clock expired on the evening of September 7, 2011. At this point, the game remained playable, but all the cows were replaced by blank spaces and said to have been raptured. Bogost intended the Cowpocalypse event to signal the "end" of the game to players; when addressing a complaint by a fan who felt the game was no longer fun after the cow rapture, Bogost responded that "it wasn't very fun before."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker

Author seems to understand how a certain kind or degree of grief makes people crazy -- I spent a year or two in that sort of condition after a couple of untimely deaths in the family, (as well as a couple of other personal setbacks) when I was younger. I think some of the superficially negative reactions in this thread actually describe the authentic insufferable-ness of persons in such a state. They can become bitter, nihilistic, self centered, unreliable and just bizarrely ill-behaved. The story might seem overwrought and hard to believe, but I was really like that for a while, and couldn't seem to stop even when I knew it was happening.

"Kirill Krechetov[...]asks that his real name not be used out of concern for his safety."

'He was initially contacted several weeks before the summons letter landed in his mailbox – in the form of a message sent via the messaging service Viber: Kirill Ivanovich, we are waiting for you, Krasnodarski Krai, 10th Brigade of the GRU Special Forces."'

Uh, did they just expose his real name?

"Jeff Schaffer, the director of that Super Bowl spot, said in an email that he and Mr. David did not have a comment on the market collapse.

“Unfortunately I don’t think we’d have anything to add as we have no idea how cryptocurrency works (even after having it explained to us repeatedly), don’t own it, and don’t follow its market,” he said. “We just set out to make a funny commercial!”

Priceless.

As a user, you can force allow zooming:

In Firefox find the settings, select “Accessibility” and activate “Zoom on all website” In Chrome find the settings, select “Accessibility” and check “Force enable zoom”

OMFG, thank you.

Haha, everyone asks, and no! We visited first in the summer, and then bought the house sight unseen and showed up in February. We lived in Alaska for awhile though, so I think we're good -- it takes a lot of winter to impress me after Fairbanks.

Moving to upper Michigan next week (Marquette area). Visited on a break from SF during lockdown, just bought a house. Me before closing: "It's great, shh, don't tell anyone." Me now: "It's great! Tell everyone!!11" ;)

Not too hot, not too expensive, not too on fire, plenty of water.

> most ad placement is profiled and personalized now

wow, really? you mean like on cable, different cable boxes fill the ad time slots with different targeted ads for different people?

(sorry if i'm being dense, i've never had my own cable)

Thanks, maybe some effortful study of the fundamental properties and manipulation of the DOM would be helpful to me.

> other useful things one can do in the dev console?

There just seems to be a suprising amount of built in stuff in the browser that does more than rendering text/layout.

I participated in some interesting work at a hackathon a while ago that used a web audio component to signal back and forth between various laptops and phones. It was mostly getting hacked together in the browser dev console.

(I'll come back with some code if I can find it...)

EDIT: OK, here it is: https://github.com/cantino/ultrastound

I'm kind of trying to go the other way. I am amazed at how productive great front-end/js-first developers are with even just a browser console --- but I am totally flumoxed by this environment, and have trouble sinking my fingernails into the first ledge on that learning curve.

Is there a "terminal developer's guide to front end"?

Yep. When I was a student I worked in a restaurant with an ex convict who described his previous job at the meat packing plant in precisely those terms. He told me it was a hard dangerous s*** job, and back of the house in the restaurant was a lot better. He said safety measures and equipment were inadequate, and some of the other guys that worked there wanted to kill him (his remarks on your other areas of concern would be ill suited to this forum).

That put things in perspective for me, because I had thought that the back of the restaurant was a hard dangerous s*** job - - in fact the hood fans and ac didn't and work, the food thermometer in my shirt pocket regularly read above 110F, and I was generally surrounded by sharp things, hot things, greasy floors and boiling oil, and the shift manager chest bumped me and screamed in my face. But for that guy it was a promotion.

That was in Texas, which is a "business friendly" state, so those progressive reforms might be more... incremental than the average hn reader might wish.

[dead] 4 years ago

Original title: "Gal Gadot's 'Death on the Nile' banned in Lebanon, Kuwait over 'Wonder Woman' star's Israeli background"

I wouldn't be surprised if there were considerable variation between properties. My observation was that there seemed to be a remote higher level management office that was out of state, and out of touch with local conditions, but still trying to control costs aggressively. So the one local property manager was grossly overworked and under-resourced. She actually seemed quite pitiably desperate (and there was turnover in that role).

Also, maybe in lower COL areas than SF bay it might be easier for them to source labor and services at a cost they were willing to pay. They kept saying it was because of covid, but my previous and following landlords both managed to provide basic essential services like legal mailboxes and working toilets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yep. I recently lived in a Greystar property in San Rafael. The garage gate broke and was tied open with a rope for several months. The front security gate latch broke and my key card didn't work on half of the doors. The mailboxes' latch broke and post office repeatedly notified management and stopped delivering mail for weeks at a time on several separate occasions. Same with the package room. There was no on site security -- you can guess how that turned out in the bay area.

When I moved in, the place was riddled with broken stuff. The toilet, sink, dish washer, and washing machine were broken. It took months of email and "support tickets", to get that stuff fixed, I fixed the toilet myself, and let the small stuff slide. Management was almost unreachable and seemed disorganized at the local level. It was totally surreal.

All for the bargain price of 3400/mo. Luckily it was a short lease. This was mid 2020, so I was happy not to be downtown for while, and San Rafael was wonderful, but I was out of that place as soon as the short lease was up. It took them six months to figure out how to cash my final check.

When looking for my next rental, Greystar managament was an instant deal breaker, and I would recommend avoiding at all cost.

So according to these sources, Canadian truckers don't have to be vaccinated. They just have to quarantine if they have symptomatic COVID.

The first link says "On Wednesday evening, a Canadian Border Services Agency spokesperson said truckers would remain exempt from vaccination, testing and quarantine rules — a reversal from what the government had said publicly just hours before."

My top hit on the search is a primary government source stating that: "A Canadian truck driver who is not fully vaccinated can't be denied entry into Canada—Canadian citizens, persons registered as Indians under the Indian Act and permanent residents may enter Canada by right. [...] Any individual who is symptomatic upon arrival to Canada will be directed to a Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) official and will be directed to isolate for 10 days from the time they enter Canada. As of January 15, 2022, unvaccinated or partially vaccinated foreign national truck drivers, coming to Canada from the US by land, will be directed back to the United States."

I must be the only person here who doesn't already know about these trucking protests; I'm having trouble establishing the basic facts of what is in dispute. Who exactly is required to be vaccinated?

It seems like the fraction of truckers who engaged in cross-border trucking with the US were subject to a Canadian federal vaccination mandate, which applied to some workers in the transportation sector as well as many federal workers, but this requirement was dropped a couple of weeks ago for cross border trucking.[1]

Are the truckers still protesting even though the requirement for cross border truckers to be vaccinated was dropped? Do they have some further demand?

Is anyone here able to kindly cite a (non-editorial) journalistic source which summarizes these events?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadian-truckers-sta...

Honestly, where does anyone even get it in 2022 USA without paying $200 for a permission slip, and then $500/fill? It's like trying to buy "research chemicals" in the 90's :/

I don't know what the "75th Percentile Forward Multiple" is, but if it's down %52, it's down more than "the stock market"; the S&P is down about %6.5, NASDAQ is down a bit less than %12.

Perhaps this article is not meant to be understood by a mere programmer like myself. Could someone kindly explain what I should be worried about?

Applying for 20-30 jobs a day seems like a lot to me (US, dev), so I'm curious if the process is different for you somehow in ways I can’t figure out. I think it would be hard to find an open position, figure out whether I'm qualified, edit my resume to target the role, write a mission/personal statement, and or cover letter, depending on which are required, fill out the various forms etc. fast enough for that to be possible.

I have been advised that employers notice when candidates are spamming their resume without making a visible effort to demonstrate that they have studied the particular company offering the position, and that they are particularly well qualified for, and enthusiastic about, _this_ position, and understand and meet it's particular requirements. I have been taught to expect a very low response rate otherwise.

Also, even if I could work that fast, it would be hard to find that many positions to apply for in any limited geographic area, so by implication I would probably need to be willing to relocate to absolutely anywhere, sight unseen and alone.

I would not have time to consider or prepare for any code screening or technical interviewing in the particular tooling required, so I would feel like I would setting myself up to YOLO the interviews.

It's hard to imagine myself realistically keeping this up for weeks at a time, while also handling any interviews or prep, which in combination I would expect to need to spend 10's of hours on per interview.

Honestly, I would really like to know if my views or assumptions are incorrect, and whether I'm being too lazy, too perfectionistic, or too pessimistic?

LOL, flagged first time in 8 years for quoting the article. It plainly has a conspiratorial tone:

"A harbinger of our brave new world order has been revealed yet again"

"There are those who can’t stand that you can get into your privately-owned vehicle at any time of the day or night and drive virtually anywhere you please."

"These budding authoritarians view that and all other forms of personal freedom as threats to their power."

How am I supposed to take this content seriously. :/

Why do boomers think turbochargers are some kind of conspiracy?

When I was younger my dad's friends thought my Mitsubishi Eclipse was spearheading an invasion of crypto-imperial Japan, and now the "New World Order" is trying to take away their gigantic, heavy ass cast-iron engines? A turbo six Charger would still be fast enough to kill you and several bystanders. If it's superior handling and gas mileage upset you, you could always weld a couple of boat anchors to the front bumper. :)