HN user

rlu

839 karma
Posts6
Comments264
View on HN

If you're not interested in the actual flying part then I'm not sure if it is worth it?

I think the path for most people is first they get interested in flight simulation, frequently in the context of flying airline jets. They start learning how that airliner works. How to start it up. How to program a flight plan & performance figures into it. How to use the autopilot. The concept of SIDs and STARs (departure and arrival procedures) (and again how to program them into the plane) and finally learning about all the different types of approaches like an ILS approach which allows the plane to break out of extremely low level clouds (think 200 feet, sometimes less!). And finally, how to perfect landings.

They do all of that usually offline. On their own, or with some plugins that inject fake AI traffic to make it a bit more immersive.

Then finally, once they have a grip on most of the above, then they hop onto VATSIM to add the challenge (just at start) and fun of talking to ATC and listening to other pilots. It just is really a great immersion factor to know there is another human being operating the plane that you're taxiing behind.

But if none of that initlal stuff sounds very interesting to ya then (1) no problem!! It's understandably not everyone's cup of tear but then also (2) probably not worth getting into VATSIM.

But if VATSIM on its own kind of intrigues you then maybe you can live vicariously through people on Twitch playing MSFS on it, or YouTube searching "msfs vatsim full flight"

I think at first you can just spawn on runways with the plane on and treat it more as a game than a simulator.

Then you can start spawning at parking spots which will have your plane turned off. You can just youtube "<plane name/type> cold and dark start" and you'll get plenty of videos that show the procedure of getting the plane started (it is more complex than starting a car).

Above is true whether you start out flying a Cessna 172 or a Boeing. Neither way is technically wrong in the sim, lol.

Note MSFS itself has a "learn to fly" section which teaches you some fundamentals. You could consider that a lightweight curriculum.

Once you want to get more serious you could look up the FlightInsight youtube channel. Real pilots use it to learn. Also, there is a service similar to VATSIM called PilotEdge which is like a more realistic version of VATSIM. One of the things it offers is a training curriculum that goes into way more depth than MSFS's native one: https://www.pilotedge.net/pages/training-program-overview. But note this is if you really wanna take it seriously. It teaches you things like airspace considerations and more. It's frequently used by real student pilots.

I enjoy flight sims, but I'm not sure I want to actually get a license.

This was me in late 2021 / early 2022.

I urge you to get a discovery flight! I did, and now I'm almost finished with my instrument rating. One of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. I love flying so much - more than I ever could have imagined.

Your wallet won't like it though.

If you use reddit I'd recommend lurking r/flying. Great community of pilots ranging from students to hobby pilots to 747 captains.

Totally fair point. I think VATSIM shines in IFR yet MSFS arguably shines at lower altitudes / in a more VFR way where you can sort of do whatever you want (i.e. don't have to fly an assigned heading or route).

I think flying VFR in an unrealistic way (ignoring airspace, altitude restrictions etc.) is plenty fun.

But, if you want to fly "realistic" VFR you could consider PilotEdge. It's like vatsim but more heavy on GA and commonly used by real life student pilots that want to practice procedures and ATC comms as close as possible to real life.

Just sharing in case you're interested :)

Step 1: Have an interest for it. It sounds like you might!

Once you know you want to, I think YouTube is a really fantastic resource. Also an active community on reddit (r/flightsim, r/MicrosoftFLightSim etc).

I recommend Microsoft Flight Simulator for most people just because it visually looks the best. People will say other sims have better flight dynamics but I'd argue that doesn't matter for 99.9% of people.

You need a pretty good PC to run MSFS though. There's also an Xbox version but it is less extensible. For example, you can't do VATSIM on Xbox.

I got my PPL irl last summer. IMO PilotEdge is fantastic for real pilots/student pilots that want to practice realistic VFR and/or IFR procedures.

But if you want to just "have fun" VATSIM is the way to go, at least for me.

Like PilotEdge I always use with a Cessna 172 and pair the sim up with ForeFlight. I'll expand my planes on it as I expand the planes I fly in real life. But the goal is to mimic real training as close as I can.

VATSIM I will always play with jets and fly IFR.

Sometimes when I look things up, I find forum discussions from over 15 years ago. It's interesting observing how at first you might not realize it, and then they make references that make you look at the date and you realize you're reading a back and forth discussion that took place over a decade ago and it's still available to look at. Do those people still have those same interests? So many little meaningless questions.

Anyways. Randomc omment but your comment reminded me of this lol.

The training converges after a few days of number crunching on a GTX980 GPU. Let’s take a look at the results.

Stupid question: why is the GPU important here? I would have thought this was more of a CPU task..??

(then again, as I typed this I remembered that bitcoin farming is supposed to be GPU intensive so I'm guessing the "why" for that is the same as this)

great so can I login with my youtube account now? I don't think I ever migrated it to a Google account (despite being asked to like a million times - would always say "later") and now I have no idea how to login to it.

Umm...I guess 'citation needed' on the VAC ban part? Valve has a very strict zero-tolerance policy w.r.t VAC bans. As far as I know, reversals are rare and only happen in mass when VAC bugs out and detects a legit program as a cheat which results in an incorrect ban wave which then gets reversed.

I'm pretty sure that if I got access to your account and got your account banned, you'd be SOL.

On the other hand, VAC bans now only affect the single game that the cheat was used in, so your entire Steam library won't be trashed. Exceptions to this include early Source games (e.g. cheating in CS:S will get you banned in TF2) and HL engine games (e.g. CS 1.6 ban also affects DoD)

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7849-RAD...

I dunno, I submitted a ticket a few weeks back for a refund and got a human. I guess his first reply was canned but when I called him out on it, he was helpful and provided me with a full refund. (I had added funds to my Steam wallet to buy an item on the marketplace and then got a 7 day market ban making me unable to use the money. A few mins later the item I wanted to buy had already been sold.)

Yeah it's weird especially since you just get done reading about how they get away with getting hit between the wings and then you get told "if you want to see this for yourself, watch the video" ... lol

Still a good read with fun drawings :)

Ahhh soooo annoying that it requires a Nexus 6. This sounds so awesome but I do not want a 6" phone. I'm hoping the next Nexus phone will have a smaller variant (and it will undoubtedly support Project Fi)

Oh god. The way he delivered it was even worse than reading it on all the news articles. He just said it with this tone of utter wisdom.

When she's giving her answer you can tell by his body language that he very quickly realized how the rest of his day would pan out.

Yep. HL2 was the first game to require it. You would buy the game at best buy and then you'd need to go download this strange program and tie the game to your account.

A lot of people were super pissed. Gabe Newell said "I know, I know, but trust me: this is going to be AWESOME in the future" - boy was he right :)

iPhone 6 12 years ago

I like the look of my iPhone 5s much better. This iPhone 6 thing looks like a Galaxy. The throwback to iPhone 1 is interesting but count me out. Not liking the design at all

The protruding camera is also really weird. I wonder if Jobs would have signed off on that...

Who knows though. Maybe once I hold one personally I'll end up liking it more than the 5s. But I would be surprised :)

Thank god.

I was sad to have to unfollow "Wimp.com". It was (and I guess sort of still is) a site that would upload 5 new videos a day. They'd be anything from funny to cute to jaw dropping to inspiring to just plain interesting. But you could pretty much bet on them being great.

A few months ago they decided to turn their titles into clickbait. It was so incredibly frustrating to see them go down that path. I don't know if their quality bar for videos also dropped, or if that's just my disappointment seeping through.

Does anyone know why Uber doesn't easily just give you your own rating? If I know my rating is low then I know I should work on improving it if I want to continue using Uber...

Seems kind of like a win-win-win for all three parties (Uber, driver, myself)

I've never interviewed anyone, but also, if they don't ask me any questions about the company then I'm gonna think they simply don't care and they applied for the role "just for a job".

I don't want to work with people who don't care.

Well to be fair, they likely get many more applicants than you have interviews scheduled.

And it's just a pre-screen, right? It's not like you have to make your decision right there and then if you do well in it.

This is obviously kind of delicate, but as someone who has referred to young-ish women as girls before, I'll at least attempt to explain my confusion.

Men are often called "guys" - and the connotation to me is just a more informal way of saying "men".

What is the female equivalent of "guy"? Is it chick? Chick certainly doesn't seem right and (to me) kind of has different meaning associated with it as compared to any extra meaning "guy" has when compared to "man".

"Woman" usually seems very formal to me in the same way that "Man" does. So...what do I use instead? Sometimes I do use girl in its place because it seems less formal but (I thought) not offensive.

If someone says "do you know who John Doe is" in a work context, I will probably say something like "oh he's a guy working on XYZ"

If someone asks "do you know who Jane Doe is" in a work context, I will sometimes say "oh she's a girl working on XYZ". I admit there is some extra thought process in choosing the pronoun:

---1. Who am I speaking to?

---2. How old is the person they are referring to?

IDK. Kind of just a brain dump, but just wanted to explain where I come from. But I'll internalize the fact that this may actually be irritating to the women I'm referring to. And that was never my intent.

Edit: I just realized that even in your comment you used "Guys" and not "Men". Basically case in point as to the 'conflict'. Why didn't you type Men? it just feels kinda formal, right? But maybe I should just bite the bullet and go the formal route if my attempt to be less formal just ends up being offensive...

Wow. The whole co-founder thing is pretty disgusting.

"he said that holding her out as a co-founder “makes the company look like a joke” and “devalues the company.” Mr. Mateen tried to justify the situation by saying “Facebook and Snapchat don’t have girl founders, it just makes it look like Tinder was some accident.”

There are so many things wrong with that, especially given that Tinder exists because she was the one pushing for it over the Cardify thing. (assuming that's true).

Sean Rad may not have called her names and been as over the top and insane as Justin Mateen, but he is very much in the wrong as well.

From the sound of it, Mr. Mateen didn't even earn his spot in the company. He was just "long time friends" with the CEO and so got a job as Whitney's boss. And then she is the one that gets shafted? I would be so upset.

I keep reading that OneDrive lets users upload adult porn either through here, or reddit AMAs, etc.

However, the terms that are linked to me at the bottom of OneDrive.com specifically tell me that uploading porn is not allowed and presumably (haven;t double checked) tell me that if I do my MSA will be deactivated.

It's nice to have you and co. tell me that you allow porn, but the fact that the terms I legally agree to contradict what you say sort of puts me in an uncomfortable position.

Have you thought about changing the terms of use to accurately reflect your policies?

Yo 12 years ago

That's fair. I think you did just find a use case for it? But I think the very fact that you won't install an app just for that (rightfully so in my opinion!) by definition means there is no value there.

Yo 12 years ago

I just...what? I don't understand.

It's basically begging for you to switch apps after you get the "Yo" push notification. I can't really imagine a conversation which goes like this:

Me: Yo

Them: Yo

Me: Yo

Them: Yo

...

What I can imagine is getting a Yo from someone, switching apps, and being like "what's up? [p.s. dont fucking Yo me anymore. Just message me using a real app.]".

That "wut" app is similar in that you can't have a real conversation with anyone in particular, but it can at least be used for sharing secrets or something. I guess. Yo doesn't have such a use case that I can see.

They could maybe pivot it to act like tinder where if both of the parties yo eachother then it goes to a separate section of the app where they can actually IM eachother. But...idk. That doesn't seem particularly interesting/differentiating either.

I must be naive/short sighted.

There are plenty of examples of Microsoft releasing a product which initially had little uptake but that eventually, after several releases, did well. Even big ones like Windows, Office, and SQL Server are examples of this.

As for unreleased products: I think that is an orthogonal discussion.