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When people notice an influential employee that works at a company is active in a community, that presents them with an opportunity to talk to a living breathing person that might actually respond to questions that they feel have been ignored by official channels. People ask questions like this all the time. Unfortunately, sometimes its the only way to get someone at a company to actually help you.

Its possible that it happens, but from my admittedly limited anecdotal experience from seeing a half dozen or so people claim that they were banned for no reason and then taking a look at their comment history, they were absolutely banned for a reason.

Do you have an example of someone being banned simply because they shared an unpopular opinion?

Also "not true in general" implies that you seem to think that its a widespread problem and banning people simply for having an alternative opinion is one of the more common reasons people are banned. On HN that is something I find hard to believe.

In a different thread someone recommended charging a small fee for new accounts to prevent abuse. Dang responded that its important for everyone to be able to participate. Between his response and this article I reflected quite a bit about the nine years I have spent on this site, the various weird and mostly wonderful interactions I've had with the community, and the way it has shaped my career and therefore my life.

On this site I have received legitimately profound and sometimes life changing advice and insights from a wider variety of people than I have interacted with in any other format: schizophrenics, the homeless, people from a wide variety of cultures (wealthy and impoverished), and industry rock stars.

There have been disagreements and occasionally arguments. Some of them have made me a little more aware of my own bubble and allowed me to recognize aspects of my world view that were ignorant or that at least failed to consider different points of view.

Much of this was possible because its a place that values the participation of everyone. Articles like this excellent piece of writing shine a light on how important it is.

Edit: I figured some shadow banned people would respond. I was actually talking about at least one person that ended up getting permanently banned that happened to be an influential person to me. Part of what makes this community great is that while we can have heated disagreements we largely do it more civilly than many other online communities. While its an accurate assessment that Hacker News has a liberal bias there are lots of conservatives here that freely share their opinions civilly. They might feel outnumbered and they might sometimes be unjustly downvoted by people that don't understand what a downvote button should be used for, but they are largely able to participate because they keep it civil. I'm pretty politically moderate myself. By no stretch of the imagination could I be considered a "SJW" or a person with a typical San Francisco political outlook (only mentioning these phrases because that was what was alleged to be the only type of person that can exist here). Out of curiosity I took a look at jrcii's account and they were indeed needlessly toxic on a large number of occasions before being banned and yet was still told if they email the admin and promise to be civil they can be reinstated. Instead of taking them up they decided be even less civil. A community can be open to everyone and still ban people that are not acting in good faith.

I think you're taking it too literally, you can manipulate lots of quotes to turn them into something they weren't intended to be.

Pretty sure the quoted person wasn't promoting the rape of intoxicated people.

I think the intent was not wasting your time on being rejected by people who aren't even in a position to give you what you are asking for because they don't ever have the authority or power to grant it. That makes more sense than viewing it as an excuse to prey on people that are temporarily in a disadvantaged condition.

I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage.

People have ben telling them this for years. They know and do not give a shit or at the very least they are powerless to do anything. The redesign is so bad I'll stop using reddit completely if they ever kill the old domain. Its almost like they intentionally tried to make the least functional website possible.

Sounds rapey only if you are ignoring the fact that people have a right to consent or not consent to sexual things that happen to them.

I spent more time with videogames than encarta. However, trying to get pc games to run in the 90s taught me how to troubleshoot computers. When I had Internet access I still played a lot of videogames but I also learned a ton of stuff from poking around on websites. The Internet taught me networking, programming, digital forensics and lots of other useful stuff.

Luckily my father introduced me to the first one as a kid. However, likely also due to being eclipsed by Wolfenstein 3d, I didn't even know there was a sequel.

They just re-recorded their first album which was a pretty straightforward but still weird trash album from 85 that's arguably as good as anything else from the era. It was recorded by a kid on a 4 track though so the quality of the original was too bad to really understand how good it was.

Dave Lombardo (Slayer Drummer) and Scott Ian (Anthrax Guitarist) joined three of the original members for the re-recording. Scott Ian was a fan of it back in the day and thinks it was more musically complex than what they and most of the other big metal bands were doing at the time. And it was written by 15-17 year olds inspired by Slayer's Reign in Blood.

But yes Bungle did a later album that was crazy circus metal and eventually they did a really great album of music that was less heavy (not metal at all) and more accessible called California.

I love all of it. Search for the 2020 version of Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny for their new stuff. Easily the best album released this year IMO. RTJ4 was also pretty good though.

Bungle wasn't really an offshoot of FNM, it was the lead singer Mike Patton's first band. FNM is also criminally under-rated. Their only really famous song "Epic" isn't really representative of the rest of their work. IMO the follow-up album Angel Dust is the best album of all time. They experiment with lots of genres and its still weird stuff though so its not gonna be everyone's cup of tea.

Sample of the Re-Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U5ZKKxqUzY

He's definitely talented and I did watch his talk a while back. It was a pretty good talk and pretty enlightening. I didn't realize how much effort some musicians put into setting up like 40 different pieces of equipment to achieve a single effect for a small part of a song.

The Doom soundtrack to me constitutes excellent video game music. I didn't enjoy it enough to listen to the OST like many folks did. I'm a metal head but it didn't quite do it for me like Mr. Bungle/Meshuggah does. I do listen to the parts of the Dusk soundtrack once in a while though.

Doom scary creepy game?

People flipped out when Doom 3 ended up being low light horror game and not a fast paced shooter.

A game can have a creepy aesthetic and even scare people without being a slow paced survival game where you walk around awkwardly pointing at things with a flashlight. The early games had creepy vibes at many different parts of the game. If you disagree to each his own.

you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons

That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.

But Doom 2016 is quite literally a modernised version of Doom 1.

Not really, here's the final paragraphs to the introduction to Doom 1 from the original manual:

Things aren't looking too good. You'll never navigate off the planet on your own. Plus, all the heavy weapons have been taken by the assault team leaving you only with a pistol. If only you could get your hands around a plasma rifle or even a shotgun you could take a few down on your way out. Whatever killed your buddies deserves a couple pellets in the forehead. Securing your helmet, you exit the landing pod. Hopefully you can find more substantial firepower somewhere within the station. As you walk through the main entrance of the base, you hear animal-like growls echoing throughout the distant corridors. They know you're here. There's no turning back now.

Yes, he's a highly trained badass, but he's just a Marine. He ends up killing all of the monsters if you finish the game, but the setup and the aesthetic and lore of the entire game makes it seem like an insurmountable challenge ahead of you, just a guy, fighting through hell and later on repelling the hordes of hell from earth.

The art team did a great job replicating doom, the composer did a great job of renewing classic Doom music and merging it with modern takes on the Doom aesthetic, although it is ridiculous that the music is intended to overpower the other sounds in the game.

The gameplay is where they really screwed up IMO. Its a great game but its not authentic old school Doom gameplay. You could modernize it properly, I'm just saying that in my opinion they haven't for the reasons I explained elsewhere. They instead created a new thing that uses the Doom franchise and it just happens to be fantastic. As great as it is though I would rather have had a well executed modern take that also feels authentic.

I think you are on to something about the impact being forced to use your imagination has. Quake 1 had amazing art direction and each chapter had its own feel because each of them was designed by a different dev following his own ideas.

I think perhaps the biggest reason why Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal don't feel "creepy" like the old games is because they are completely missing the point. The newer games are fun, beautiful, well designed games. However, instead of making a game that captures the essence of Doom its more like a Michael Bay version of Doom. Instead of desperately fighting never ending hordes of increasingly horrifying creatures from hell so you can get out in one piece and save the world, you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons for lulz. The whole way the story makes it seem like its a foregone conclusion that you've won. Its not a struggle, its just you punishing the hordes of hell that are powerless to stop you.

Aesthetically they nailed the look of the creatures although as you pointed out less can be more. The sound track is good but at some point the composer was consumed by his own pretentiousness (IMO Dusk's composer that replaced him produces far better "Doom" music). The combat is fun and if it wasn't a Doom game it would still be rightly lauded as one of the best shooters of the generation, but glory kills annihilate the flow of the game IMO and detract from any authentic feeling it may have had. Glory kills feel like shortened, dumbed-down quick time events that you're supposed to spam the entire time you play and quick time events always feel bad.

They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me.

I mean its literally a Doom game, but the franchise has clearly lost something and I feel like a lot of the people that preach about how authentically they captured the experience might be too young to have bothered to play it.

Doom II: Hell On Earth is IMO one of the top 5 games of all time. Quake 1 is also on the list. I hope some day we get proper remakes or spiritual successors that capture not just the aesthetic, but the feel and the point of the original games.

Dusk was a decently sized step in the right direction.

Halo's trick was to sloooow the action down.

I agree that the action was slower, however, Halo's real trick was designing a set of weapons that were fun to use, but were mostly horribly inaccurate. The sniper was the clear exception.

I did a controller VS mouse/keyboard competition with Halo 1 on PC vs the best console Halo player in my Battalion when we were deployed to Kuwait. We would both use the same weapons at the same time for most of the games to make it fair and objective since we were doing it out of curiosity. We were mostly even with the majority of the weapons. With the shotgun the console player had a clear advantage although I don't know why because I would have assumed a mouse would still be faster (maybe it was just me). When we were using sniper rifles, however, with my mouse and keyboard vs a controller it was like playing against someone that had never played Halo before. The mouse was just too quick and accurate and at that point Halo hadn't developed a really egregious form of aim assist yet. The funny thing about this last observation was that I was the one that had barely ever played Halo.

Note: I don't look down on people that prefer gaming on a console and I have enjoyed my Switch/PS4 immensely. For some genres an analog controller is objectively superior without purposefully implementing a software advantage to balance things out like many games choose to do with aim assist. I do tend to agree with Shroud's opinion that when it comes to competitive play at a certain level of MM rank they should just have separate queues for each controller type. Ultimately its a tradeoff though because if queues for a game like COD:Warzone were forcibly separated the game's community on PC would have died completely after a month or two like previous games did.

Diet Dr Pepper.

No one drinks it because most people think even regular Dr. Pepper is gross, but Diet Dr. Pepper is nationally recognized as a household name in the US because of the extensive advertising that they do for it. "Diet Dr. Pepper tastes like regular Dr. Pepper." Hardly anyone drinks it, but pretty much everyone has heard of it.

Same as Mellow Yellow a couple decades ago. They advertised it extensively and when they used to give away free drinks under the cap it was always free Mellow Yellow. But relatively few people actually liked it. That didn't mean we hadn't heard of it.

Unlike those other topics we still have a culture where they wear their technological illiteracy as a badge of honor.

They don't need to understand the tech to recognize that there's an issue, but they do need to understand the the tech if they want to have any hope of regulating social media and fixing the issue that they have identified.

They mostly seem to give the impression that Dorsey/Zuckerberg, etc, could just tell their companies to do a thing and then it magically happens.

They at least need to understand the tech well enough to recognize that fair, effective content moderation for billions of people is a more difficult and more complicated problem than any of them have attempted to solve.

I think social media companies could do a better job of being transparent and working to reduce political bias, but I do appreciate the challenge that they are facing.

Perhaps instead of Tim meaning that its impossible for Apple to have a service outage, he was instead talking about the incredibly unrealistic things that were happening in the video. 1 guy accidentally unplugs 1 cable and brings all of Apple down, which results in applications closing out on everyone's devices and the apps just start magically uninstalling themselves.

IDA is great but Ghirda is the new hotness on the street.

Ghidra is great but its got a long uphill battle before it dethrones IDA as the choice of professional malware analysts.

Coding and math books frequently list prerequisites by saying something like "only really trivial mathematics knowledge that any adult should be familiar with" and then you start working through the book and realize they meant any adult that took multiple years of calculus in high school and graduated with a BS in Comp Sci or mathematics.

As a high school drop out that only later on developed an interest in learning its pretty frustrating. My BS is in Information Systems so I've missed out on a lot of math that seems to make learning computer science and programming easier. I'll have to give this resource a try. I'm a big fan of his reverse engineering material already.

Its just too much of a coincidence to me that at the same time they got acquired by a Bobby Kotick run company they started churning out games that, while not completely terrible, when compared to their older efforts were uninspired, generic trash made by money hungry assholes.

It never felt like something Blizzard would do, it felt like exactly what Activision would do. Maybe too many of the key people had left at that point. It happens to a lot of companies when they get big.

People Don’t realize, but industry workers get injured/die every year on movie sets (though it is better than it used to be).

Is this largely due to construction projects like sets and the use of heavy equipment, or is it more from stunts or something else I haven't considered?

Also, since you're an insider, when they build sets and props and stuff, do they still have to follow OSHA requirements and get safety inspections and stuff?

Replying to my comment because its too old to edit. Apparently Carmack is still somewhat involved and spoke at a recent Facebook event. He talked a bit about working on this problem. I'm hoping we see the results of Oculus' effort soon. I already like using it tethered to my PC, but if it can get significantly better that would be awesome.

He also mentioned he hopes they can eventually get an official wireless solution out to the public.

Valve has been resting on their laurels for years.

They aren't just a game development company anymore. Their primary product is Steam. If Half-Life Alyx was playable on any PC or console it would have been one of the best selling games of the year. Its only a niche product because, instead of resting on their laurels, they are trying to drive the industry forward.

Not only did they make the Index, which is by far the best VR Headset yet, they also supposedly helped HP develop the Reverb G2 that's coming out soon.

GabeN likes playing Dota but the idea that he sits around all day playing videogames when he's been building, improving, and expanding a billion dollar gaming empire is ridiculous.

There's also the massive progress towards making Linux a viable gaming platform. Really the only thing keeping me on Windows on my gaming system is the fact that most competitive multiplayer games' anti-cheat software can't run on Linux yet. If I played mostly single player games or casual multiplayer I could play almost everything I want to on Linux.

IMO they are plenty innovative. I wish they released more games, but aside from gaming they are doing a lot of great things for the gaming community.

There is latency and in VR latency is more noticeable to begin with than it is with normal gaming.

Also, there is a good amount of compression involved so the graphical fidelity takes a massive hit.

They claim that they are going to be improving both of these issues, but given that they still exist in largely the same state as they did with the Oculus Link Beta with the V1 Quest, people should be skeptical about how much improvement they are going to be able to accomplish. Carmack talked about some ideas on how it can be made better, but I don't know if he's still assisting them with anything at all.

I'm very happy with my v1 Quest, but its PC support has some significant drawbacks.

Not sure if it was the case for Chuck, but a small percentage Christians strongly believe that charity should be anonymous because it actually says as much in the bible.

I'm not a Christian myself and definitely not rich at all, but I do prefer anonymous donations.

Its important to prevent individual companies from doing it but its also important to prevent groups of companies and even entire industries from doing it.

It should be a real defense for mentally ill people that have conditions that make them somehow less culpable for their actions, regardless of wealth.

I wouldn't be surprised if Holmes is a sociopath, she perpetually has a classic crazy person bug-eyed look that you only get from being constantly on coke, being a fanatical religious nut, or from being severely mentally ill. Additionally, in public she purposefully talks 100% of the time in a laughably fake deep voice that she thinks makes her sound more masculine and powerful. There's a podcast where she accidentally broke character for a couple of seconds and sounded like a normal woman. The rest of the time she sounds like Kylo Ren. That's supposedly another thing that sociopaths do.

Its crazy that so many smart people fell for her con. She was obviously a creepy, random lunatic trying really hard to pull off a Steve Jobs act. As a layperson it seemed pretty obvious that the technology she claimed to have invented was probably impossible. Shame on anyone that's actually in the medical industry that bought into it.

And then there's her criminal actions, the lying, and the complete lack of remorse.

Unfortunately for her pretty much no civilized society thinks that sociopaths shouldn't be held responsible for their actions. So unless she convinces people she has an unrelated mental illness (which is what the article makes it sound like she's trying to do), its not going to be a good defense.

failing to provide adequate representation

This means they have to put an honest and significant effort into defending you to the best of their ability. They are responsible for the quality of their work, which is why they don't generally let the clients dictate the details of how they work or the overall strategy because the clients don't know what the fuck they are doing in virtually all cases where a lawyer isn't on trial.

You keep trying to change the situations you are talking about and then pretend that they are the same.

This is false.

No its not. You are moving the goalposts. Obviously people can hire whatever lawyer they can afford and potentially change lawyers if they have a valid grievance that a judge agrees is a reason to allow it. They can also opt to attempt to defend themselves. In either case, the judge would probably tell you that its an incredibly stupid decision that you should reconsider in a very kind attempt to prevent you from ruining your life.

There's a significant difference between "I can make my lawyer do whatever I want them to do because the law says they have to" and "I can get a new lawyer if my current lawyer doesn't agree with me."

I thought the uncanny valley specifically referred to things that are so close to realistic that it physically creeps people out because they subconsciously know somethings wrong. Not necessarily realistic graphics taking away the magic. We aren't even close to the level of realism in games that's creepy IMO. Probably another few generations of GPUs away from that.