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sillysauruson Why We Can No Longer Trust Microsoft

Not in the wildest scenario would the US government have jailed the leaders of Apple, Google or Microsoft.

That may be naive. Most people have skeletons in their closets. The government would use these to pressure those leaders to acquiesce. I suspect the most dangerous skeletons are ones which seem harmless to you, but cast in the proper light they can be used as a justification for punishment. E.g. Something which seems harmless now can retroactively be used to claim you were doing insider trading. Few people would step up to defend you, even if the charges are baseless, because recently it's been fashionable to hate capitalists, and trading stocks is the epitome of capitalism. So it'd be very much "obey us or we will litigate you into bending your knee anyway."

Jobs was immune because he was the CEO equivalent of a rockstar. To try to pull baseless charges against him would outrage the public. Yet I'd imagine the public would get grim satisfaction out of seeing Ballmer punished, even if the charges were baseless, because most people don't like him. It's shallow, but it seems true.

sillysauruson The Grep Test

Which features would convince you that Arc is fast?

sillysauruson The Grep Test

Actually, it's not any harder to write maintainable code in Arc. In many ways, it's much easier, because you write your program as a set of parts which fit together like an arch.

sillysauruson The Grep Test

expressive power and conceptual beauty is Lisp's core strength, not code maintainability or runtime performance.

Well, Arc is actually very maintainable, and quite fast. After all, HN is powered by Arc, and it serves >100k daily uniques on a single core.

sillysauruson Anonymous Person Posts $500,000 Bond To Free Texas Teen

I think this should be tried in court as a threat to kill

You can't be serious?

sillysauruson Anonymous Person Posts $500,000 Bond To Free Texas Teen

For the record, here's exactly what the teen said:

"Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still-beating hearts. Lol jk"

That's an obvious joke. The "lol jk" wasn't even necessary to flag it as such.

sillysauruson Ask HN: Why Not Spam Identity Thieves?

Interesting idea, but if you pre-loaded a database with a bunch of fake profiles, then the hackers would simply use all profiles after id N. So you'd have to continually be generating new "fake" profiles during production, which would cause extra load for the servers. That translates into higher cost.

sillysauruson Feds, We Need Some Time Apart

Wouldn't that be assaulting a federal agent?

sillysauruson Valve releasing Dota2 for Linux

It's not inherently the nature of the game. It's the nature of matchmaking.

I played HoN before matchmmaking, and it was quite interesting: you created a lobby, people would join, and you as leader could vet your teammates and kick the ones you didn't want to play with. Then the game proceeded once both sides were happy.

It took about ~10mins to get a game going, but the games were far higher quality.

sillysauruson DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

I think the point was to congratulate DDG on its success, not to say that DDG would be more resistant to the military digital complex.

sillysauruson Movie Subtitle Fansite Raided By Copyright Industry And Police

Maybe, but what they were doing is harmless in every sense of the word, and law is about repairing harm.

sillysauruson Valve's flat management structure 'like high school'

Popular = profitable. This equation governs the gaming industry.

In the case of Dota 2, the game is bringing in millions via the in-game store. The game has 200k active players at any given time, and they're well on the way to 1mil active players in a few years. A significant portion of those players are buying tournament tickets. Most of them are buying custom equipment like couriers, announcer packs, etc.

Dota 2 will be the most lucrative Valve project since Steam. To call it insignificant is to be short-sighted.

If you still think the MOBA genre is insignificant, then perhaps this infographic will offer some perspective: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2012/10/12/league...

Source: I worked in the MOBA genre.

sillysauruson The 'Sink-Urinal' Saves Water, Encourages Men To Wash Hands

Well, actually, urine is sterile. So cleanliness isn't really a factor in deciding not to use it.

It is pretty gross in an illogical way, though.

sillysauruson If Kerouac wrote JavaScript

I think you've won "longest horizontal scrolling on HN"

sillysauruson “Weird Paranoia” at Valve, Says Former Employee

I don't understand -- when you hire someone most of the team isn't comfortable with, then you're making a compromise. And compromising on people is one of the worst mistakes a technology company can make, right? So why do you disagree?

sillysauruson “Weird Paranoia” at Valve, Says Former Employee

For what it's worth, I agree. But in this instance, Valve is the last bastion of hope for game programmers in the industry to work somewhere whose owners don't try to exploit us as money fountains. If there's a place whose culture is worth preserving, it's Valve's, even at the cost of this particular project.

sillysauruson “Weird Paranoia” at Valve, Says Former Employee

It's obvious from her words in the article. She wanted to bring people on board and the "old timers" didn't agree with her choices. Since the old timers are the epitome of a company's culture, then that means she was poisoning it. The options were to let her do it or let her go.

sillysauruson “Weird Paranoia” at Valve, Says Former Employee

What could Valve possibly say? "We fired her because we felt it was a mistake to hire her, and then afterwards there wasn't anything for the rest of the hardware team to do."

It sucks, but it happens.

Incidentally, this is exactly why a large portion of the Valve handbook is devoted to hiring. Letting questionable people into your company will poison the place from the inside, and then from the outside. This is a perfect example of that.

Valve wanted to get into the hardware field. Then the way she went about hiring people made it clear that it was a mistake to hire her in the first place. What else was there to do except layoff the entire hardware team, or let her ruin the company culture by acquiescing to her demands for "let these engineers work here, or this project can't work"? And maybe it couldn't. But preserving company culture is far more important than this particular project, especially at a place like Valve.

sillysauruson “Weird Paranoia” at Valve, Says Former Employee

It's important to take this article with a grain of salt. It appears that it was written based solely on her (obviously one-sided) testimony.

sillysauruson Hacking For Good

I've seen it said many times in HN comments surrounding depression that these drugs are not the answer to depression. I tend to agree.

It'd be good if you'd explain an alternative.

sillysauruson Handbook of Applied Cryptography (2001)

Oh.

Then which (if any) algorithm is currently believed to be safe from quantum computing?

I think I was thinking of lattice-based cryptography.

sillysauruson Handbook of Applied Cryptography (2001)

Elliptic curve cryptography isn't vulnerable to quantum computing. EDIT: This is mistaken. I was thinking of lattice-based cryptography, which isn't currently vulnerable to quantum computing.

In the video game Final Fantasy, there's a spell called "Doom" which places a countdown over your head. When it reaches 0, you die.

RSA is Doomed in exactly that sense: it's just a matter of time before RSA offers zero security, whereas elliptic curve cryptography remains (for now) unbroken.

sillysauruson "Just open-source it" is not realistic

Well, I'm happy you self-promoted. Ignition Deck looks really awesome, and I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise.

For example, http://ignitiondeck.com/id/crowdfunding-a-video-game/ is the most valuable crowdfunding breakdown I've ever seen.

sillysauruson Ideas on how to improve customer conversion and ease of use

Have you seen his conversion statistics?

Good ideas often seem bad. You can't know until you've tried it and measured it. At least he's trying it.

sillysauruson AT&T will start selling customers’ usage data

Don't worry, they'll figure out a way to get you off your unlimited plan. For example, my coworker, who was also grandfathered into their unlimited plan, once came into work complaining that AT&T had throttled him to 20k/sec for the rest of the month. When he called them up, they told him he had used more than 2GB in a month, and so was throttled.

sillysauruson Startup Investing Trends

VC's won't invest in competitors - how would you give advice/counsel?

Hmm. YC does, and it seems to work ok. Why wouldn't it work for later stage VCs? Or rather, why does it work for YC?

sillysauruson Startup Investing Trends

because that startup has to be the only one of its type they invest in.

That's surprising. Would anyone mind explaining why that's the case? YC has no such restriction, and it seems to work out ok. Why wouldn't later stage investors do deals with multiple startups in the same space?

sillysauruson A Dark Room - minimalist text-based game

The point is that it's valuable for game developers to realize that some people can't play a game that requires javascript. The comment helped facilitate that.

sillysauruson A Dark Room - minimalist text-based game

This has no place on HN. Substance or nothing.

EDIT: Remember, your votes decide the type of discussion you'd like to be having in the future. So down vote me if you'd like to see more bullying on HN.

sillysauruson A Dark Room - minimalist text-based game

As a game developer, I care. Any sign that my potential audience is cut by a technology choice I make is valuable information to me.