dafelst

It is generally not super difficult - most professors at universities have Masters and PhD level grad students, and more often than not, faculty are listed on the university websites.

Find a local university, look up their math (or whatever) department, and a simple email to one or more professors explaining what you want to do and that you're willing to pay will more than likely give you some leads if nothing else. Hell, you might even find that the professor's time is within your budget depending on the institution and their level of seniority.

As someone who perpetually overscopes side projects and ends up biting off more than I can reasonably chew given my free time, I really love this idea. What happens with me is I start a new project, then add a new feature here and there (because coding is fun) and end up never reaching anything close to "done" then getting into analysis paralysis of what to do next because there is so much. Ultimately it gets abandoned and forgotten and put on the graveyard of all the other side projects - not that this is horrible, I do them for fun and not profit, but it would be nice to launch a few.

If OP is actually the author, a question - what was your approach in keeping the projects tightly scoped and not introducing feature creep? Deadlines or time-boxing? Pre-emptive deciding on what you will and won't do? Lowering your standards for "good enough"? Just plain old discipline? Something else?

Good for you dude, keep sharing - Hacker News content feels like it is predominantly from top-tier CS-degree'd wunderkinds, and for anyone just getting into the industry it feels like an awfully high bar to reach.

Your stories show a less traditional but just as valid approach, and I think it's an important thing to show people that you can get into tech and still make a decent living even if you're not one of the stereotypical HN FAANG crowd. The whole world isn't Silicon Valley, in spite of what you often see here.

Especially in games, the difference between 1ms and 3ms is huge. So perhaps the code doesn't need to be optimal, but ideally it is optimized.

Join Google to change the world as a top tier software engineer, then spend all your time updating protobuf definitions to keep internal tools glued together as Yet Another Widely Used Internal API implements breaking changes.

Such a lot of wasted talent.

I use Unreal in my day job and I am very familiar with it, and I found it much more difficult to learn and operate than Unity.

Even as an Unreal "expert", for personal projects I still use Unity, it is just much easier to get stuff up and running and iterate.

"Food tasters" seems a little out there, but it's certainly plausible that they're lackeys ordering for higher-ups. Or also probably equally likely, themselves and/or teammates.

Is this effectively v3 of Thunderhead? Good to see the pivot towards using k8s, the 20+ minute propping of a 1-2GB container on vanilla Playfab/THv2 really made it a non starter for our company's internal playtesting.

Also is Hesky still around these days?

I was going to comment the same thing, all the Carmack era id software open source code (Quake, Doom) is very nicely structured and quite easy to grok.

I don't know what they do at Shopify, but I have seen teams be successful with using dbt's (https://getdbt.com) unit testing methodologies and tooling. It makes it very easy to do things like cardinality and null checking, and if you're using a datamart like Snowflake with snapshots, it is super easy to have test harnesses with representative data. To me the combination of tools there is the secret sauce, since data mocking is such a giant tedious pain in the ass.

At my former job (large search engine) until a couple of content moderators sued the company for damages related to PTSD, they did virtually nothing to protect their employees.

The other management strategy was to just outsource to contract content moderators in the Phillipines, who presumably don't have the resources or legal framework to sue the parent company.

It may be better now, but back then (7-8 years ago now) it was pretty terrible.

The once ubiquitous UltraEdit text editor for Windows used to have a similar message on its website and still does to this day. I remember it being a little odd back in 1997 or so when I first started using it, especially living in relatively secular Australia.

> This is our story ...to God be the glory!

https://www.ultraedit.com/company/idm-full-story.html

Ballmer era Microsoft is a very different beast to Nadella era Microsoft

"Bootstrapped" typically implies self-funding, so most likely no VCs were in the picture.

The games industry is not that big, it is not difficult to get backchannel references on almost anyone who has been in the industry for more than a few years.

It feels like a less comprehensive look at the Japanese concept of "Ikigai", at least the version that has been popularized in the west. The "prestige" and "what the world needs" sections could probably be substituted, though the concept of prestige feels more self centered to me at least.

Here is an example graphic describing this interpretation of Ikigai and its components: https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/ikigai...

I know that you are being sarcastic, but there is an honest answer - most people I have met in the industry who are treated like shit are either:

a) Too young or inexperienced or fearful of reprisal to understand how to advocate for themselves and others; and/or

b) Just unaware that better places to work do exist, and are convinced (much like the thread parent here) that "this is just how gamedev is"

Unfortunately because gamedev is a dream job for a lot of folks they are unwilling to rock the boat because they want to live their dream. That is why unions are a great opportunity for people like this, it gives them some agency to make a positive change.

Or, alternatively, just don't work for companies that treat their employees like shit.

There are plenty of game dev companies where employees are treated well (I work for one of them) but "game company treats employees like human beings" is not an interesting enough headline, so you don't tend to hear about it.

But in spite of working for a really good studio right now, I recognize that many people are not (I've also worked with ones that were middling at best), and unionization is a great step towards getting better conditions, especially for artists and content people. Engineers tend to get the best treatment since toxic management know they are more expensive, harder to replace and have more opportunities across a variety of industries. Conversely, if you are a 3d artist (just as an example), there are only so many places you can work, and unfortunately you are often considered more disposable.

This is some top tier hacking and reverse engineering, incredible stuff.

I'm in my 40s and haven't experienced that - perhaps you're not looking in the right places

You do know that experience with a particular technology is only a tiny part of the equation here, right? A veteran with 20 years in the industry has seen a LOT more stuff than someone with 10 years in the industry, irrespective of the tech stack. To call the two equivalent is very short sighted, especially at the Staff/Principal level where that person is ostensibly responsible for making high impact decisions.

He is a vestige of a bygone era, his time has passed and he should be given the boot.

People may not like that feature (I sure don't), but I would bet a decent sum that feature didn't drive increases in negative metrics like churn, and increased positive metrics like hours watched, perhaps by causing people to scroll through more of the library faster, or perhaps drawing people in with the previews. Or maybe they just saw in improvement in a non-core metric like "distance scrolled" with no other negative effects and said, "meh, ship it". Both seem likely.

Of course this is the danger of any sort of behavioral metric driven optimization strategy - you may trade negative customer sentiment for positive business outcomes. That's where the real decision making comes about, i.e. are you willing to make that trade? It seems that in this case, Netflix was.

I am white but with black (and now slightly grey) hair and a beard with tan-ish skin. More pertinent to your implication I assume is that my middle name is of Muslim descent and can pass for being of middle-eastern descent, and I seem to get stopped for "random" checks and patdowns more frequently than my white-bread looking friends and colleagues. Observation bias perhaps on my part, but also maybe not.

Getting knives past airport security seems not particularly difficult from the experience of my circle and other anecdotal sources. I've had friends and family accidentally get knives through security on many occasions, and I have also accidentally done it myself. To my knowledge none of them has ever been caught in the converse situation and had to give up a knife.

I imagine if one were resourceful and deliberate about it, it would be even more successful.

I've worked on content moderation systems for some Really Big Platforms and it is definitely not uncommon to have a list of "super popular" content that is exempt from the automated banning systems, rather they get escalated to a human for review. This is implied in the article, but for more context, in my experience, this is usually because of a few reasons:

1) Automated systems usually have thresholds trained/set on content of lower popularity, and they often fall apart when popular content gets flagged, so the precision of such automated bans in those cases is not always good.

2) Brigading of popular content is a thing, and a giant pain in the ass to detect reliably.

3) And probably most important: the impact on the business for a false positive ban via automation on popular content is very high, so a slight delay in ban issuing pending human review is usually not that big a deal.

The last one implies "rules for thee and not for me" and that is 100% the case - it's not pretty, but these services are a business and unfortunately they will always bias towards their bottom line. The reality is that popular content gets special privileges, it sucks and it is unfair to up and comers, but that is sadly the name of the game.

Great overview OP, and it's nice to see a kind of "in-between" scenario tested, i.e. not a super fast web request or transformation, rather something more akin to a lightweight batch job. It may not be quite a "recommended" use case but it is always interesting (for me at least) to see how these sorts of services' capabilitied can be pushed and or (gently) abused. The memory and code size limitations do seem very restrictive right now, which is a shame though.

Seeing WASM evolve as the new sandboxed runtime target dejour is a super interesting and I love that it is bringing more variety of very powerful but traditionally backend or systems languages to the web.

I've found that the biggest marketplaces are on the Chinese web, places like taobao have a HUGE number. Also Russian social networks as well.

It won't stop anyone who has the skill to author cheats themselves (i.e. someone with basic reversing and programming experience) but it does do a good job of detecting and banning players who are using widely distributed "commercial" cheats.

I look at EAC as being very analogous to a virus scanner, very easy to bypass if you know what you're doing, but good at catching the common and soon-to-be common threats. It also puts up enough roadblocks to make some novice attempts at cheating inconvenient at least.

Source: I deal with all the anti-cheat stuff (including EAC) on a semi-popular multi-player game. I can verify that it does make a very tangible difference to our player base in terms of the number of cheaters they are exposed to on a per match or per session basis.

Don't conflate "illegal" with "wrong".

Obviously there is a lot of overlap, but the reality is that civil disobedience is often the only way to force changes in unjust laws, history (even incredibly recently) has proven that time and time again.