engtech

FYI, Fallout 3, New Vegas and Skyrim have mods that will save every 5 minutes, and this helps with the crash on autosave problem. At the very least you'll never lose hours of playing.

The mods use a rotating save system so you end up with 5 minute intervals of the last 3 hours of gameplay.

Checking the size of your save games get let you know if you're going to hit the problem. At some point your saves jump to 5MB then to 10MB and soon you'll start hitting the crashing on autosave bug.

That was a great talk, and well worth listening to. I think it also highlights why we find your blog posts interesting -- because you are an engaging speaker with that mysterious "charm" quality.

I feel that the HN post title is missing much needed air-quotes around "That'll Never Work" since the talk is all about ignoring the internal voice that tells you to give up.

While I've only done much less impossible things, I have found that the act beating the impossible helps give confidence for future tasks. You realize that things aren't as impossible as they seem at first glance.

Were the pundits referring to this interview?

   “The demographics race we’re losing badly,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-republican-convent...

I think my favourite comment I heard someone say to describe the Republicans demographics problem is when watching Romney's camp during election night:

"It looks like he's at a family reunion."

If the 7am-noon trend is caused by the social factor of EST to PST working coming in to work, it'll likely be mon-fri, with spikes on mon and thu.

That is the usual pattern for sites that people check when they come in to work.

One trick I've always tried to maintain is daily releases, namely that I'll always check in code at the end of the day so that it can run in the smoke tests overnight.

Running stats on our version control, I do about 4000 checkins a year, the next highest is 1000, and most team members average about 300.

That being said, my focus is horrible. Using the pomodoro technique has helped me in the past, there's something about not being allowed to multitask that means you can avoid context switching off of a difficult task to something easier (eg: the coding equivalent to cleaning off your desk).

My other problem is a willingness to work overtime. It's one thing to do it for deadlines, but because I internalize monthly deadlines I always have something that I think is so important that it Has To Be Done Now.

Interesting site, but I found it hard to get in to a groove of stuff I found interesting.

The introduction to the site might work better if it followed a model like netflix where they always show new users some very popular stuff in different genres at the start so they can see the value of it.

That holds true for any content website, lead with your best foot to get engagement, and then lead people down the garden paths to see the obscura.

The key to getting attention is to talk to someone about something they are interested in -- and everyone is interested in themselves.

Reading the email, it really felt as if it was from someone who already knew the OP well. If I'd read something like that about myself I would have question my first impression that this was a stranger -- surely we'd had coffee or something at some point? Met at a conference?

In the same way that mimicking body language influences someone, the email was couched in all kinds of casual point about "this is how we are alike".

Hit them right in the tribal monkey brain.

Does anyone know what firms the campaigns are using for the campaign emails, or is that not public knowledge?

This is the same B.S. that happened with the Xbox 360 hard drives.

In 2006 Microsoft sold a 20GB hard drive for $120 (which could have bought at least a non-branded 100 GB hard drive)

When you used it with the 360, the hard drive would only report 14 GB because 6GB were used for the OS.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911593

FYI Apple's operating system takes up 1GB, so this is relevant because a 32GB Surface has a much usable storage as a 16GB iPad (source: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-surface-storage-siz...)

Great, you've hidden the message with javascript, but now it's still in view-source and in search results for bots.

It's also still visible if someone is using noscript (actually, I have no idea if Facebook works with noscript, probably not).

The solution you are suggestion doesn't solve the problem and injects more corner cases.

That's still a few down in the search results.

It looks like the magic search term that brings you right to the report page is: "Facebook vulnerability"

http://google.com/?q=Facebook+vulnerability

That's a great tool. I hadn't realized that every time when I was "sharing with Facebook", or "commenting with Facebook" I was actually installing all kinds of Facebook apps that would have long term ability to post as me.

Facebook needs to have some more tinfoil had granularity for some of that stuff. I'd be fine with allowing some of those apps some of their crazy permissions if I had to authorize it every time.

And wow, do app designers ever need to start doing a better job of naming their apps. The Pizza Pizza Canada app was uatpizza or something dumb like that.

It shouldn't... but it could be easier. I've been in the situation before where I wanted to report malware on facebook and I couldn't figure out where to report it.

I agree that you don't want reporting a security issue to supersede the general case of problems, but as things stand it is hard to figure out how to report a real security issue if you don't know about that magic whitehat url.

Googling "facebook security" brings

#1 result: https://www.facebook.com/security

no information on reporting problems there

#2 result: https://www.facebook.com/help/security

this one has a Report Something link... but that doesn't give you options for reporting a security issue, just TOS violations or copyright infringement.

#3 result: https://www.facebook.com/security/app_10442206389

This looks better than the other two, but there is still nothing here about how to report a security issue.

Knowing what to look for, there's a hidden "Take Action >> White Hats" link that will eventually take you to the correct page: https://www.facebook.com/security/app_6009294086

So click that link... and presented with a huge page of names and still no obvious call to action: https://www.facebook.com/whitehat

Oh, it's the Report Vulnerability link in that sidebar that we're been conditioned to ignore in the normal Facebook UI.

https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/report/

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Just to recap, in order to find how to submit a security bug report, it took me 15 minutes and I still only found it because I knew the term to look for was "white hat" and not "security".

So much of it has to do with where the economy is.

Looking for a job in 2000 vs 2001 was a change in what you could demand as a salary. Same in 2008 vs 2009.

"Don't waste your 20's "building a career". You've got your 30's and 40's and 50's to do that."

It's hard to try to pivot in your 30s if you don't have a resume with at least some points to match your future career.

If you haven't used anything from your post-secondary degree 8 years after getting it... employers are going to notice that and assume that your degree is worthless.

I say this having seen far too many friends get stuck in the waitress/bartending life only to find out that you plateau in your 30s unless you go into the high end fine dining, sommelier, running your own place, etc.

Same thing has happened to friends in retail after they reached manager or assistant manager at a store that was supposed to be their part time job.

"2) Statistically, women need to have all their children by 35.

According to the author, a woman’s ability to get pregnant plummets starting in her mid-thirties. To make matters worse, the odds of a miscarriage for a woman over 35 is one in four."

Our family doctor gave the odds as 3 in 5.

In practical experience, I know of four friends who have miscarried at 35 (after being pregnant for over 3 months), out of about 11 who had kids at that age.

My wife and I have always suspected that the 3 out of 5 statistic also includes miscarriages in the first two months of pregnancy where you might not have been sure you were pregnant or late.

That blog is quoting from a Seattle newspaper article without linking to it, here's the link to the article:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2012/10/31/who-is-seatt...

The newspaper article is quoting from the photography is not a crime blog:

http://www.photographyisnotacrime.com/2012/10/10/creepy-man-...

http://www.photographyisnotacrime.com/2012/10/30/creepy-came...

According to photographyisnotacrime, the original youtube Creepy Cameraman uploader was itsrighttherenow which has been deleted for copyright infringement.

Here's a google cache of his youtube page:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6OBvqhK...

That's as far down the rabbit hole as I could go to find the original source of this story.

You're awesome, thank you. I would have never found that.

We're so conditioned to look for the volume UI to be near the play button.

Thanks for the clarification -- I'd never heard of circular/tampon before so I wasn't aware of what had happened, hence my question.

I'm even one of those people who never figured out what buffer app was for despite all their posts on HN.

Good on you for renaming the project... but why would you chose that name in the first place?

I'm not trying to start a flame war -- just curious because I've been in a similar situation.

After university I named the first C unit test framework I wrote the oh-so-obvious C*NT. At the time I thought I was being funny, but over a decade later and I can see that this is a symptom of the underlying misogyny/"boy's club" that is high tech.

That's another feature that makes this "better than soundcloud" because they don't provide a volume adjust on their site.

Really annoying for those times when I've been playing soundcloud in the background with some other audio source in the foreground (like a video game, or even just mail notifications going beep)

I'm not knocking you for using those sources btw, that's a decent way to ignore the hard part of a problem to get to a minimum viable product -- plus licensing tracks is soundcloud's problems. Soundcloud is also ripe for disruption because their interface of overlaying comments on the waveform while playing tracks is at best distracting and at worst causes my web browser to crash all the time.

When listening to soundcloud I use this bookmark to turn off comments on the page:

   javascript:(function(){$("a[class='comments-toggle']").click();})();

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Do you have any additional filters on your sources, or are you straight-up playing the streams as-is?

I'd suggest putting in min/max song lengths (to strip out the 2min previews of tracks that sometimes get posted). Although I think your sources are clean enough to handle that. You probably want a 15 min maximum to skip over mixes that sometimes get posted (or better yet, give a playlist for listening to continuous mixes)

If the soundcloud api provides favourites you could use that as an input as well.

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You could pretty much create a simple version of last.fm by using a "similar artists search" and then mutiplexing the individual soundcloud pages for artists.

So you could have a "sounds like Skrillex", "sounds like High Rankin", "sounds like Knife Party" etc where all it does is randomly play tracks from similar artists.

So under the hood, it is just random tracks curated from existing blogs using their soundcloud pages?

http://soundcloud.com/dubstep/

http://soundcloud.com/drumandbass

http://soundcloud.com/housemusic

So I guess the next genres to be added are: -Electro.NET -Moombahton.NET -GlitchHop.NET -TrapMusic.NET -FutureGarage.NET -HardDance.NET

Does this idea seriously raise its head almost every hurricane season? Is there any citation for that?

Who (other than Michael Bay) is talking about nuking hurricane?

edit: tried some google news searches, I can't find any discussion about bombing a hurricane other than this article.

Gladwell writes a lot of anecdotes which are then taken as pseudoscience, and unfortunately get repeated as science because of his popularity.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/18.html

> Michiko Kakutani reviews Malcolm Gladwell's latest book in the New York Times: “Much of what Mr. Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success. These hypotheses not only rely heavily on suggestion and innuendo, but they also pivot deceptively around various anecdotes and studies that are selective in the extreme: the reader has no idea how representative such examples are, or how reliable — or dated — any particular study might be.”

>

> This review captures what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works. Whether it's Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random jibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story. Spare me.

If you like this, you may want to get a copy of the book this evolved in to: "Smart and Gets Things Done"

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/05.html

http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Gets-Things-Done-Technical/dp/15...

$3 used, $11.61 new

Not sure if there's an ebook version, searching for a PDF brings up some programmer's blog who looks like he's hosting it illegally by accident.

Even if you are a "normal white male", your wife and children aren't.

It can be fairly trivial to find out family details of a target and harass the wife/children.

Maybe you don't have strong opinions that would inflame someone to the level where they would interfere with your life like that.

But it's ignorant not to have enough empathy to think that does happen in a world where a woman can be stalked/assaulted after someone sees her out jogging.

My 21 year old straight cousin was gay bashed for walking home from a bar with his equal straight friend.

I've been racially profiled even though I'm white because I have a Fred Armistan-like hodge-podge of vaguely ethnic features.

People are dicks.

They're probably using 1080P as the definition of HD.

The last time I looked at buying a movie in iTunes, the max resolution they sold was 720P.

two paragraphs followed by a "sign up to read more".

Content in that format is not going to do well on any social media site.

Even with a Vanilla Ice picture.

This is the same reason why the idea that you can't bequeath your iTunes purchases on death seems like lunacy to most people.

Purchased goods are purchased goods, and the idea that something is licensed with restrictions seems ridiculous to most people unless it's something upfront like a subscription that you are paying monthly fees to access.