erikb

Yes, always make sure to follow all the rules you've read in a book! Then you will be save and feel well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kfgXoclrjk

Don't use the form. Use the legal way to quit any contract in your country. For instance that means sending a paper letter to their offices with the postal service confirming that the letter was received. If your contract has a quitting period pay the 3 months or what. Then stop and ignore all the annoying emails and letters they send you. They will not sue, because they would lose.

Might cost you $5 for the special letter type, and might cost you 3 more monthly fees than you would be willing to pay otherwise. But this is 100% save in all countries with a working legal system. Of course if they come after you with baseball bats or car bombs, then you probably can't quit their "services" anyways. ;)

For some reason kubernetes community doesn't like docker. I'm not sure why, though. Afaik Docker was what started the whole container hype, and docker-swarm having some nice features like dependency tracking that I'm personally missing in kubernetes (there's probably a project for that already which I haven't tried out yet, tho).

I think the bigger point in the future will be not AI beating known gambling activities (gambling in the sense that you put in money and have a random outcome about whether you get money back, let's not have a discussion about poker being gambling or competitive sport). The bigger point will be AI creating gambling activities that are even less resistable than our existing options. There might be digital drugs.

This is more about historical AI challenges. When Chess was beat people realized painfully and happily that they can't beat Go with the same approach. Therefore it was the new Mount Everest.

And Starcraft is a competition because SC1 was a game that was easily adaptable for AI hobby coders and competitions. A little like they have this Robo Soccer world championship for Robo builders. It's part of the domain culture I guess.

Which is not much, if you could've gotten $500M more in investments.

My experience is the complete opposite of Tim Ferris Wisdoms TM. If you are where the money is at, you have vastly more opportunity to participate on the receiving end of money flows as well as information flows. So if you are a keen developer in SF you will not live on $60k for long, but rather quickly bargain your pay up the food chain to $120k or $150k. And then check out how well you can live on $120k in Thailand, you know?

There are two exceptions to this rule of following the money, though.

Exception 1: When you hit the ceiling. It might be much higher than you initially thought, but there is one. And when you hit it, it might be more reasonable to try to stabilize on that level and find a more peaceful and cheap environment to live in.

Exception 2: When the current location is over hyped. Bay Area might still be in that phase where prices really are too ridiculously high. If you spend more than $60k/year on rent alone then maybe it's not wise to go there for $120k. But it might still be worth an internship or finding customers there.

It's not just safety and security that must be provided, but social inclusion as well

Isn't it curious that we need to provide this as external source of safety? I'm not disagreeing, I also think so, but it's still surprising.

If we think about that "the machine" is objective, and that it can look into our hearts, that it wants to reach as many of us as possible, and wants to convince us to do its bidding by positive feedback loops, then why doesn't provide safety and security as a default?

Makes me wonder if our feedback loop is somehow "buggy" and that the feedback loop and our needs are not really correlating that much.

Have I missed it or are there no results in the article? First he has a long intro, which is nice. Then he goes way over board explaining his data and code. Then he talks about his mattress. If you've seen results can you point them out to me? Thanks.

Well, it's always a trade-off. When you inline stuff that is in separate functions you certainly increase the debuggability and readability and maybe even the performance of that one usecase you currently think about. If your goal is rather straightforward and your code is unlikely to be reused in high percentages in later developments (i.e. if you are coding a game in C++) then it might be a really good idea.

But if you work for instance on MS Word your goals will change 2-4x a year, you will have a list of hundreds of goals, your code might be reused in MS Excel without people even telling you, etc. In such kind of situation it is much, MUCH more important to encapsulate everything in classes and methods and functions (methods changing states, functions not) in a way that it can be treated as a black box. So in that kind of situation you are rather building lego blocks and hope that they can be connected easily enough to build the house that the little child, which is your boss, wants. In that case your lego blocks each need to be very testable and very connectable.

And the truth is that most of us live somewhat in the middle. We have a clear, highest goal that needs to achieved asap, while at the same time having loads of competing medium-priority goals that change all the time. So, while John's insides might be awesome by itself if you haven't thought about this topic before, please don't go full steam in that direction for a few years now. The best result is usually a little unclear and in the middle between two extremes.

you can try to find likeminded people on Mastodon (also currently on HN front page, an open source, federated twitter clone) or scuttlebut (imo more decentralized even, but quite focussed on solar punk in New Zealand) I guess. Also the Pirat Party (actual political party in case you don't know) uses a similar system IIRC.

And you can probably just start with the community around Decidim and work your way outwards to a wider community by participating in discussions and learning to know people.

Until now the destruction of jobs through progress has never reduced the amount of work we needed altogether. For instance think about how the development of transportation created dozens of new jobs actually, and brought us in many regards onto new levels that wouldn't have been even imaginable before. I wouldn't worry too much about something that might not be just-bad and instead try to figure out what can be done with the changes that we already see. E.g. all this nice virtualization and automation means it's so much easier to share code and changes and ideas, and helps us communicate over borders, language barriers, etc.

Storage and network stability is much higher if you run it on top of Openstack. k8s on baremetal is a pain in the butt. Disadvantage is that you have even more layers of abstraction.

I think you can have both situations. I still remember a talk from a Google person maybe around 2010 where he showed clearly that if you try to make the data "better" but in general have way too little data points, then it can't be useful either.

It's just now that we had almost a decade of pushing towards more IoT and more Big Data, that many companies have huge data lakes that they don't know how to make use off.

So instead of applying one of these lessons it's probably best to see where one is lacking (quantity or quality) and work on resolving that specific problem accordingly.

It seems like the dissonance you felt from reading comes from the article being written more in a business style of writing and thinking rather than a technical style which you are more used to.

For instance the "velocity data" and "but over a decade it makes a difference" parts. From a technical perspective it's awesome if you know that thanks to the data science you can outcompete others over a decade. But in business terms thinking is quarter based (i.e. three month) for short term and yearly for long term. The current leader that has to spend his budget on data science or other stuff has to find an advantage in it in the next few weeks after implementation, because usually making it happen takes already a quarter or two.

You might think they are idiots for thinking that short term, but their goals are also set in this way. So if they invest heavily in a topic and don't see any results for 3 quarters they might be replaced.

So if you say algorithm X will cost him 80% of his budget to implement but only shows results ten years later, for him that's the same as "no results". It's just the game he has to play to stay in the game.

I personally think this is part of why companies will not be able to make a drastic change in their DNA and instead will be replaced by the next generation of companies who comes out of start-ups, or be replaced by companies who already actively participate in the market in other areas and have the right DNA to take on the market. For instance Amazon is already more data driven than the traditional super market chains, therefore they now can attack that space with their modern technology.

And again he is contradicting himself. Because if you make an analogy from student to a learning algorithm he now gives TWO orthogonal metrics to optimize for.

Loving that part. I bet few people have combined his advise for student learning with his advise on how to do ML earlier.

Shortly after 2008 till around 2017 was when Silicon Valley, HN, and the start-up world in general surged heavily.

Now I think most people agree it's behind it's ceiling point. (most != all)

Of course before the first internet bubble also companies succeeded, but then when the bubble burst there was a dry phase.

in my experience [slackers are] rare (and 100% protected by management)

Can you give an example of how you see slackers being protected by management? I wonder if we have the same definition of the word slacker.

In my experience the people protected by management are not doing much in terms of daily work, but they work a lot to always stay on top when it comes to prestige and taking credit from other people's work. So from my perspective they are working hard, just not to improve the teams results. That's why I call them parasites. They suck out the value of the team for their own gain.

What I call a slacker instead tries to do nothing but reading facebook (or HN) all day. Most of the time these are people who have given up hope to improve their careers for one reason or another. In many cases it is connected to a parasite sucking too much out of them and them not being able to recover self-motivationally.

I bet at least before readign this post your understanding of slacker and my understanding of parasite would be similar, right?

Well, naturally every company has talent drain. The rockstars will not work long in one company and jump from one gig to the next. But if you have bad luck and hired some slackers, which will happen with the tightest of hiring schemes, then they will certainly stick around.

Thus over time you still have to re-hire people you really need, but get a bigger and bigger amount of people who are just there for the social benefits.

So what can you do to achieve your ambitious goals? Reduce the workforce and try to find a cutting point where you get rid of mostly parasites while keeping your ambitious work bees around.

Usually at the same time of the cut, some of the work bees also get raises and promotions, because then there's some free budget. So if you are an ambitious work bee, then "cutting staff" is actually also good news.

Finding the right cutting point is really the important point and hardest part. For instance you don't want to lay off people who really are performers but for some reason or another (e.g. they just got a baby) they don't perform right now. So at least in the companies I could look inside until now the cutting point is usually well inside the slackers group, so that the people who would recover and then start performing again have a chance to continue.

In the end, even the most tyranical ass-hole leader wants to have as many people as possible work as hard as possible to achieve his goals for him, in exchange for an amount of money that in most cases is peanuts for him. And not all leaders are even tyranical ass-holes.

I'd guess: They are symbol of order and a source of income for the police.

I think it's the very best dungeon crawler when it comes to comfort of use and startability for new players.

And I would suggest it not just for gamers but for programmers as well. There is a lot one can learn about user interfaces, shells, coding, architecture, data management (items, races etc are all data) with the additional motivation to learn it while playing.

It's also not the first dashboard with this situation.

phpMyAdmin or what it's called, back in the days of LAMP stacks that was deployed almost everywhere without much security around. Not sure if it also had sql injection bugs etc, but just the low amount of security considerations most people gave this direct access to the database was probably enough to hack into most servers of that time.

I don't know why people say that. You don't support Windows XP and Windows 10 either with the same binary.

In contrast to Windows you can provide or pay someone to provide libcurl3 if you want to continue to use it. MS will just say you can go F yourself.

In contrast to Windows you can study the source code and write a wrapper that provides a central API point that you can use in your single code base.

In contrast to Windows you can actually go there and provide patches. Even if the original authors won't merge it you can still use it via a fork etc.

And last but not least I bet there are actually still people supporting and providing libcurl3 binaries to this day and you just need to google their package server and add 2 lines to your installer script (one to add the public key for that package repo and one to add the package repo to your package manager).

PS: If you provide software for sizable amounts of people you need to provide 1-3 out of 3 reasonable Distros: Debian, RHEL, Suse. Even if you just provide one most people can deal with it thanks to VMs or docker.

That is why mostly people with wealthy parents will attempt med school. You can trust me, I lived with med students in a living coop for some time. Where CS students rent an apartment in a 30 story block on the outskirts of town, med students live almost in the center and rent a whole house together. It's not even comparable.

And do you think anti depressants get paid by health care? Someone needs to buy them as well. Most CS students I know are happy when they can afford the frozen pizza from the super market.

And that's also the main point here. It is a sign of wealth that you can worry about depression. If you are not, then you are also depressed, probably even more so, but can't spend time worrying about it because you worry about rent and food.

The difference between med students and other students is that more med students can afford these medications, I'd say.

start with a shellscript, then a REST API (+REST aware CLI), then a website, then a mobile app.

And until now nobody is complaining how this moon landing was fake because Jim Bridenstine used a 3D simulation instead of a photo. I'm impressed.

Improvement to YOUR life always comes from YOU. If someone else does something it is to improve THEIR life. They will certainly tell you that it will be good for you, but in the end your advantage would only be a nice-to-have side effect. If you feel the money is passing you by without you getting a share then YOU need to find out how to change. For instance by learning how to do "tech stuff".

And then, when there are a bunch of people who really want to improve actual problems arise. E.g. universities being too expensive for them. Even free online courses require some level of basic skill to start use them. How to get the funds for the equipment. And of course the technicl infrastructure to provide electricity, infrastructure and basic living needs one can't provide for when one spends 10 hours crunching technical problems.

These are problems I hoped to find answers for in the article, or at least suggestions. People being too proud to accept the new status quo and hoping for more icing on their apparently already tasty enough cake before they start moving their asses, that is nothing. Even if they get it they won't start moving. Cake makes fat and lazy.

I personally feel a lot of the mid-level towns in Western countries (not just in the US of A) actually have a good starting point. Roads and trains are already government supported and therefore good enough quality or better. Super markets and a few restaurants are there already as well. Internet is there, although it's maybe not the highest speed. Schools and libraries have some computers and wifi access if they want to. Office rent and land prices are cheap. Also with the internet location itself is less and less important, which is why so many administrative and create jobs can be outsourced. They could be outsourced to your town as well, if you could find a way to compete. No need to be close to natural resources, in a trade hub like a coastal town, etc. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with road and internet access is totally fine to start competing.

The only thing that is really missing badly is people moving their asses. They have a tv and enough money to buy beer. The car repair every once in a while is quite painful, but otherwise they don't feel motivated to do anything with their life. Some won't even travel to a nearby coastal town for a weekend on the beach or something.

In the meantime I'm friends with a Chinese cook who works for $100/month a 14h/7day cooking job and then after that at home spends time learning how to code to make more money and work fewer hours. I mean, if our rural folks could get up to do half of that, then they would be able to work a $50k remote work web/app developer position in no time, and boom they are part of the "tech elite".

You can do AI-like meta-planning without using your brain btw. What you do is you choose a simple pattern of reaction to what happens on the screen, then you play. If you like the result you try to do more of what's at the core of the pattern, if you don't like it you change the pattern a little. No thinking and abstracting needed. For a game like DDR it might even be enough to get to the very top.

You should study how markets work. Sadly customers are not the well educated, disciplined people we want them to be. Especially for entertainment they are often exhausted office workers who just want to relax in the evening. They really need some relaxation and some escape from reality. And they pay for it not as a political choice but like VAT, something they can't avoid. They are the slaves of whoever produces the best solution for their relaxation.

So the power comes not from the customers but from the investors. Because investors will bring money for developing these products and they will do so with the very intention to influence the market to their own advantage. And these people want a more and more centralized monopoly around their source of income.

That's why companies like Blizzard get worse and worse, they don't care if they lose their current player base. They can gain another and make their investors more happy with that.

That's why a company like EA exists for so long and is so successful.

The market is not getting better but worse. The more easier to use and open worldy and better graphics the AAA titles get the harder it becomes to find players and investing for your indie titles. Probably we will also see that regulation will set in more and more, creating real legal requirements to sell games.

Indie games will always exist. Like indie movies, and indie music. But they will make less and less money, get less and less actual funding, and become more and more a personal hobby and art form.

You cannot define "the game" as MVP, make it as good as possible, and then be sad about not making money.

You go there without a game(!) and put different stuff in front of people's faces that they can pay for. Simple things that you can produce in a few hours. A kickstarter page, game_object.jpgs, planning schedules that you move up one year each year, engine demos, and then you look what brings in most cash.

And only if it's "engine demo" that brings in most cash, and only if it seems that the paying customers of that "engine demo" want "more gameplay" then you start building a game. If they pay more for schedules or for kickstarter pages, then you do more of that.

So I would argue SC follows much more closely the MVP+iteration principle than ED, and that IS(!) why it is financially more successful.

All that said I would not fall into the trap of defining "financial success" as only success. Financing the building of a game that is mostly there for people to enjoy a space simulation is also a succss! And in that regard X4 and ED are much more successful than SC will ever be.

This description makes me wonder. There are lots of games who have huge amounts of depth like Paradox's grand strategy games. And they also claim the "tell your own story" environment, reasoning that the depth gives the environment that you can use to tell a story. So kind of the opposite of what you say being required.

Why do you think depth is not a requirement for this self story telling game? Isn't it getting boring quickly?