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dangeroon Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?

I’m biased but I think game devs are some of the smartest out there. The bar is high.

dangeroon Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?

I run a game studio and we often hire people that worked in other industries before. In fact most of our staff have no prior professional games experience.

When I see people fail to transition its because they aren’t willing to put in the work to switch industries:

1. Learn some games relevant skills after hours to show that you are prepared and not expecting us to train you from scratch (unity or unreal are most common). The tools are free for personal and there are tons of free online tutorials. Build a small game — can be very small like a breakout clone. This will show the initiative you took on your own and what skills you’ve developed.

2. Don’t expect us to pay you as much as you’re making in your past industry because your skills may not translate and we will be taking a risk on an unproven gun.

If you go into the interview with those two it’s a no-brainer for us, but we also are a small indie studio so ymmv at a larger place.

dangeroon Canary Tokens

Modern compilers have flags that add memory and stack canaries does that count?

dangeroon Distributor cancelled an order and we need to move 30k bags of coffee [updated]

Yes, but like others have said, I never thought it was worth it. I like to focus on moving forward.

I have a friend who worked for a large law firm and he told me that even they wrote off some unpaid bills or negotiated discounts. I was shocked to find that even when the lawyers could deal with the legal work themselves, they chose to pass.

That changed my thinking on the topic.

dangeroon Distributor cancelled an order and we need to move 30k bags of coffee [updated]

Glad they actually paid. I've had similar situations where I'm still waiting for the money 5 years later (I know it's never coming)

dangeroon Saying “sup” with `net send`

When I was in college I realized that they hadn't disabled net send with wildcards on the CS computer network. We all had individual logins.

One day I walk into my lab class and see that a poor soul forgot to logout of his session. I'm sitting with my lab group and explain this "net send *" macro that would send a message to every single account on the system.

Another person in my group says "I'll do it." He types it in and presses enter.

We log out of the account, then log into one of our accounts, see the message, laugh and move on.

The next week, I get to my lab and this kid walks in and says to my lab group member sitting in front of the computer "Can I speak to you outside?"

He goes outside and we think nothing of it, but then I hear my lab partner outside the door say in a raised tone "Look, I have no idea what you're talking about! Goodbye!" and he comes storming back in.

This lab partner was absent the week before and didn't know what had transpired. We ask, "What did that guy want?" He says, "Some BS about how he thinks I sent a message through his account to everyone on the network because he forgot to logout last week and now he's in trouble with the CS department because they think he did it."

Our jaws dropped and I think if he had spoken to anyone else in the group we probably would have laughed and he would have known it was us right away. I still wonder how much trouble he got in on our behalf for embarrassing the CS IT department. Didn't seem like that big a deal to me.

dangeroon Ask HN: What happened to Magic, the text-message concierge?

Yeah in the end when you recognize that they just try to be middlemen, you realize you're better off finding a remote personal assistant that remembers prior context.

dangeroon Ask HN: What happened to Magic, the text-message concierge?

I had an absolutely horrendous experience with Magic a few years back. I wanted them to find out how much all my competitors charged hourly so I asked them to call and ask but was very clear “you cannot say you’re calling on my behalf. Do not mention me.” I told them this stipulation multiple times.

When I got the report back, I discovered that they told all of my competitors that they were calling on my behalf to find out their pricing structure and referred to me by name.

I also asked them to call all the flower shops near me to find orchids. They responded next day “we called 10 shops near you and none have them” I found this to be odd so I called one place I had used before. They had them.

I think they should change their name because it’s not magic.

dangeroon Windows 95 went the extra mile to ensure compatibility of SimCity, other games

Yes! Right click on the exe file and change the startup options to do a full reboot into DOS. Definitely needed for the games that were hard coded to use the first MB of RAM

dangeroon LastPass user vaults stolen in recent hack

Exactly, and it's buried deep in a menu that I didn't know existed

dangeroon LastPass user vaults stolen in recent hack

To further increase the security of your master password, LastPass utilizes a stronger-than-typical implementation of 100,100 iterations of the Password-Based Key Derivation Function (PBKDF2), a password-strengthening algorithm that makes it difficult to guess your master password. You can check the current number of PBKDF2 iterations for your LastPass account here.

I just checked my account and it says 5000 not 100,100 -- there's no way I would go in and change that setting, so this is pretty disingenuous. They must have changed defaults at some point

dangeroon About the security content of iOS 16.2 and iPadOS 16.2

This is beautiful

dangeroon AWS and Blockchain

why would you want to participate in an internet that is incapable of excluding evildoers?

dangeroon The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

Maybe it’s technologically difficult from a standards perspective, but it works well for humans. If the computer smears an extra second into my day, I won’t notice.

dangeroon The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

Google does "leap smearing" which seems like the best human solution to this problem: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-...

standardizing leap smearing algos and constants could work

-Bottom layer is atomic clock seconds -We define targeted relationship between current UTC and atomic counter that will occur on a given day and time X -Time is interpolated to drift UTC into place by the given day and time X -Standards body can adjust time on some regular basis by its relationship to the atomic clock and publish the algo to convert from atomic to UTC

dangeroon Tether's Troubles in November 2022

At any moment they can see the order book size in btc and the prices so if they buy btc with USDT they can safely hold the Bitcoin provided they are monitoring the order book. If a big sell order comes in or someone tries to cancel a buy order they can preempt it with a sell from their holdings to make sure they don’t end up in the red.

Bottom line if you can freely frontrun an order book you can make a lot of money. USDT provides the liquidity to do that.

dangeroon Tether's Troubles in November 2022

1. They can see an order match for a limit order and preempt it with a better offer before pushing it through by a micro-fraction of a penny

2. They can run trading bots on all major exchanges to keep USDT pegged —- while not foolproof it will hold in most situations provided there is enough liquidity in their accounts on every exchange.

dangeroon Tether's Troubles in November 2022

I have a theory of why Tether is able to dodge risk. If they are owned by Bitfinex can they not front-run the Bitfinex order book to guarantee their stops will hit their target? They know the bitfinex order depth for every asset so they can for example buy into bitcoin and then calculate exactly when they must get out. Its possible this could be built into the core layer of their exchange software. That’s how I would do it if I wanted max profit without the risk and didn’t care about regulation.

dangeroon Crypto.com Halts Solana USDC and USDT Withdrawals

Coinbase supports USDT

https://www.coinbase.com/how-to-buy/tether

dangeroon Rammstein Get Restraining Order Blocking Viagogo from Reselling Concert Tickets

> Should only rich people be allowed to afford anything?

How else do you recommend dispersing items of extreme scarcity where everybody can't have it?

dangeroon Rammstein Get Restraining Order Blocking Viagogo from Reselling Concert Tickets

It definitely brings value to people who have money to buy marked up tickets and exposes the inefficiency of ticket pricing algorithms.

dangeroon Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

You should check out Apple App Attest —- this just isn’t true any more for mobile.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/valida...

dangeroon Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

"the statute of limitations runs from the date the litigant obtains actual knowledge of the facts"

dangeroon Some WFH employees now live in another country

yes this was my assumption

dangeroon Some WFH employees now live in another country

I have been wanting to build a POC of a vpn product where you buy a kit with two little boxes that are plug n play:

One you plug into the network in the location you are supposed to be, and the other you bring with you on your travels and plug your computer into over ethernet port. The one you bring with you can connect to any wifi or be hard wired. It has one job: tunnels all your data through vpn to the other box you left behind.

Does this exist? Seems like there could be a market for it now.

dangeroon Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

You can run a thousand nodes virtually from a single pc

dangeroon Stable Diffusion forming images from text: image snapshots at each step

It will most likely render differently on different hardware since gpu float math is nondeterministic across different environments

dangeroon DALL·E: Introducing Outpainting

similar work using Stable Diffusion in a Photoshop plugin:

https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/sho...

dangeroon Unity signs “multi-million dollar” contract to help U.S. government with defense

You can just create a singleton that never gets destroyed to handle things like this.

dangeroon AWS us-east-2 outage

For most businesses a little down time here and there is a calculated risk versus more complex infrastructure. You can’t assume all the cloud architects are idiots — they have to report their task list and cost of infrastructure to someone who can give feedback on various options based on comparative resource requirements and risks.

Zone downtime still falls under an AWS SLA so you know about how much downtime to accept and for a lot of businesses that downtime is acceptable.