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lazugod

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Minecraft does doors right in comparably simple way, and I think few if any players have a problem with it

Ha. This is an amusing claim given that redstone, the whole complicated circuitry used in advanced Minecraft machines, was arguably added for the purpose of powering doors. Years of work have gone into all of the community-made piston doors of various sizes and features. And all interactive components like buttons and pressure plates have to have their signal duration balanced against how long it takes to walk through a door.

Even ignoring redstone, though, doors are complicated to design in the exact same ways. Which way do they swing open? Depends how you’re facing when you place them… unless the game detects double doors, and reverses the second one to match. And each door has to have a corresponding vertical trap door, which can either be flush with a floor or with a ceiling. Which way do trap doors open? Well, whichever way works best with the ladder below them. Oh, which means trap doors must also act like ladders. In fact, you can climb a wall of nothing but trap doors in the game.

What about water? Trap doors can be waterlogged, and that’s a common way to hide irrigation. But normal doors intentionally aren’t. Why? Because doors are the most common early-game tool for scuba diving - a placed door becomes a free pocket of air. Does it seem realistic? No, and maybe they could fix it, but then that would affect anyone who uses doors as entrances to underwater houses, as well as make scuba diving more difficult.

Players argue about the use of doors for diving; they argue about whether they should be able to shoot arrows through the windows in doors; they argue about whether every new tree should bring a new type of wood, and thus a new type of door.

Doors are hard, no matter how simple the game.

It is... but it’s also something that web tech developers should probably pay a lot of attention to because it directly impacts what they build.

I’m very surprised how little discussion I’ve seen on HN about what this means for everyone here building public, community-building websites.

Bye, Amazon 6 years ago

He wasn’t directly involved with the response to the whistleblowers, people higher up at Amazon were (it sounds like he wasn’t VP of the entire company but of the web services section specifically).

I don’t think Americans unanimously respect titles of nobility, and I think Gruber’s point is that he personally doesn’t respect them and wishes Apple didn’t respect them either.

Whether this is a consistent point of his, whether Gruber has always referred to the Queen as Elizabeth Windsor, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t conflate convenience with respect. “The Queen” is a very easy name to remember and use informally without necessarily supporting monarchy. Like, I wouldn’t call Captain Blackbeard “Captain Blackbeard” out of respect for piracy.

This sounds like a fantastic example of basing moral guidelines around what is easy for a computer to detect rather than what is actually moral.

We know that FB has nudity detection systems, due to their past problems with banning breastfeeding discussion groups.

Where do you draw the line? It seems pretty reasonable for the CEO to show up to hearings for the country where your company is headquartered... but to send lieutenants everywhere else, no?

What is the precedent in this case? I assume Facebook is not the only multinational corporation to ever exist or be called to testify to foreign congresses. What have other corporations done?

I would think it has to do with the invisible/nonexistent/impersonal nature of Facebook moderation.

If there’s no face, if the site is designed so you never feel like a guest on someone else’s website, you'll assume you’re in control of the social rules.

When I ask about the risks of contractors developing PTSD, a counselor I’ll call Logan tells me about a different psychological phenomenon: “post-traumatic growth,” an effect whereby some trauma victims emerge from the experience feeling stronger than before.

Wow. Wow. Is this really a thing, excusing forced trauma by claiming it makes people better?