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engtechon A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

read this before starting to books. It's a great intro to the Culture:

engtechon A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

The only great change I can think of is getting cheaper MRIs.

The problem with MRIs is that there are so many false positives, but maybe regular scanning would help reduce that noise?

It is thought that most people fight cancer 5-6 times in their life before anything is ever detected.

engtechon A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

Actually, you need to do cohort analysis to see the risks in different age ranges rather than generalizing.

People in older baby boomer cohorts are doing better than younger generations.

"Decent nutrition has never been cheaper or more widely available."

Sugar/fat has also never been cheaper or more widely available.

engtechon A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

Here's Banks explaining the Culture, which is a great background that isn't even in the books.

http://nuwen.net/culture.html

engtechon A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

Read this page first as an amazing introduction to the Culture:

http://nuwen.net/culture.html

engtechon A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

Read this: http://nuwen.net/culture.html

then: The Player of Games Consider Phlebas Use of Weapons

Use of Weapons is great, but the writing is poorer than the other two.

engtechon A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

Actually, don't start with the books.

Read this webpage to get an introduction to the Culture. It's great, and it helps you get through some of the "rougher" edges in the earlier books.

http://nuwen.net/culture.html

engtechon A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

I'm very sorry to hear this.

The first Banks book I read was in a palliative care room while my mom was dying of cancer.

engtechon A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

No, more money is needed. 41% of deaths are due to cancer. It really is one of the biggest problems we have as a species and we should spend more effort on it rather than the things we do spend effort on.

But I wholeheartedly agree that rather than trying to be a billg and earn money to fund philanthropy, the world needs more researchers.

engtechon Show HN: Get a summary of your Steam account apps – price, install size, etc.

Very cool. It'd be nice if steam gave you the purchase price, then you could see all the games that are cheaper now than when you bought it. :)

engtechon Global Internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'

relevant fiction:

http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked...

engtechon Accountant creates an RPG game in Microsoft Excel

Screenshots:

http://carywalkin.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/arena-xlsm-galler...

engtechon DigitalRev.com served with DMCA takedown notice by GoPro for review

Reading the reddit thread on this, it seems that the DMCA takedown was because the review is using copyrighted images/material that is authorized for use by GoPro resellers, of which digitalrev.com is not one.

I found this comment by photoknut[1] summed up the story:

"I'm sure the DMCA was used a general way for GoPro to have this article pulled. Sure they could've had lawyer contact lawyers and go through all that, but I'm sure this was easier. They clearly don't allow unauthorized resellers to use their images, that definitely falls under the umbrella of a DMCA takedown notice. GoPro owns those images and says who can use them, DigitalRev clearly can not. "

He goes on to mention that digitalrev has a shady history of re-selling the camera they damage in reviews as a new product.

1: http://www.reddit.com/r/gopro/comments/1anq5d/gopro_doesnt_l...

engtechon EA CEO John Riccitiello Steps Down

This is a fairly good account covering the points on the EA/Maxis SimCity 2013 bad launch.

http://kotaku.com/5991077/your-complete-guide-to-the-simcity...

The bad PR move imo is that the company stated that the game requires "online access to servers for cloud calculations", but users have found a single line of code that when removed allows the game to work in offline play because it disabled the connection check every 20 minutes.

http://kotaku.com/5990997/coders-discover-20+minute-offline-...

But in general, EA is reviled for taking good IP/brands and killing them.

Here's a letter that was on reddit from an internal employee to the EA management:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/19xb2m/a_letter_from...

engtechon What's up with HN?

https://twitter.com/simcity/status/310490053803646976

"Hey, this is on Maxis. EA does not force design upon us. We own it, we are working 24/7 to fix it, and we are making progress"

engtechon Salary Negotiations: What is Possible When There's no More Money

"Weakness is strength. Strength is weakness."

Being a small flexible company means they can't compete on money, but they can compete on flexibility and increasing quality of life.

I think that's all any employee wants from a job -- a good quality of life. Money is probably the worst way of quantifying if they employee is already middle class.

It's amazing even how "here's a week to fix that low priority problem that bugs the shit out of you" would go to improve morale.

engtechon How I Fired Myself

I'm guessing the game was one of these? Likely Age of Champions.

http://www.klicknation.com/games/

engtechon Ask HN: How do you deal with Rabbit Hole Syndrome?

Actually, come to think of it, I don't know if my previous answer of "get more experience" solves this procrastination problem.

I think it's actually "have kids" that solves this procrastination problem. With having kids you get so many constraints on your time that procrastination is no longer an option.

engtechon Ask HN: How do you deal with Rabbit Hole Syndrome?

This is an experience problem. As you become more experienced, and see how you've wasted your time coming up with a "perfect" solution that ended up not mattering, then you'll be fine not having a perfect solution.

At some point you realize your best days are the days when you delete more lines of code than you write.

But that being said, chasing rabbits is what will eventually make you more skilled than your peers. Which is awesome, except now you'll have put yourself in a perpetual category of being paid less than your worth because you don't fit the same performance evaluation criteria as everyone else.

All anyone cares about is a) are you easy to work with, and do you b) get things done to contribute to profitability.

Continutally stressing yourself out by spending more time on problems than they deserve and eating away at your work/life balance does not contribute to a) or b).

engtechon I made a website that rates the latest movies by analyzing social media

It seems to me that what you are measuring is how well marketed a movie is, not how good it is on any scale. Interesting point, compare your results against box office results.

Also: the hottest and sexiest movies #6: Ice Age??? :)

http://www.buzzscale.com/?page_id=4134#62458

engtechon Open source html5 roguelike 'Wayward' goes beta

Very cool. I'm a little lost as to what to do or what my goals are.

A lot like life, really.

engtechon Packets of Death

The INVITE of death was discovered on Feb 16th, 2009.

http://ims-bisf.nexginrc.org/OpenSBC-vul.html

engtechon Packets of Death

As someone who works with FPGAs/ASICs, this isn't that weird.

Everything gets serialized/deserialized these days, so there's all kinds of boundary conditions where you can flip just the right bit and get the data to be deserialized the wrong way.

What's more interesting is that it bypasses all of the checks to prevent this from happening.

Here is the wiki page on the INVITE OF DEATH which sounds like the problem you hit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INVITE_of_Death

engtechon Facebook breaks logins

Verify they still have access to that email.

A lot of people have 6yo+ facebook accounts. I quite enjoy the fact that my verified facebook email goes to a dead account that I only monitor on a 6 month basis... it saves me from a ton of spam.

engtechon Limiting passwords to 12 characters is "secure enough"

Passwords have been compromised before by being captured in server logs that ended up being accessible.

If you are logging failed password attempts anywhere, then you've got a security hole.

Here's the details on the breach I'm talking about http://ieeelog.com/

engtechon What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

One of the subtler issues I've had with piping find in a scriptis that you end up calling a program N times instead of just opening N files in the program.

So if the program has overhead when loading, using a -r option instead an outer find loop can make a magnitude of difference to program operation.

engtechon Valve starts promoting Steam for Linux to Windows users

Being poly-operating-system also gives you a unique viewpoint and can be an advantage in most things, provided you're using each OS for what they are best at and not just trying to emulate a different OS.

engtechon Show HN: I Built An App to Teach Mind Control

FYI, Polar H7 is iOS supported only. Android/Windows users should not buy one.

http://www.polar.com/en/support/FAQs/H7_heart_rate_sensor_co...

engtechon Show HN: I Built An App to Teach Mind Control

I'm so happy you guys are using a real email address validation software!

I just had to take over yet another person's itunes account this morning because they signed up using essentially my gmail address but with a period in it somewhere.

I don't know where the trend to no longer validate email addresses came from, but it's made my life hell because I was able to get a firstname@gmail.com address while gmail was in beta.

I'm looking forward to trying out the android version when you have it available.

engtechon OK Cupid launches Crazy Blind Date

That actually sounds like a really fun time and that some good friendships could come out of it.