Hacker News Reader

strgrdon Unreal Engine 4.19 Released

I think it's funny that Fortnite will probably cause the inevitable unraveling of UE4, as yet another game engine without baked-in anti-cheat.

Cheating in Fortnite is practically unheard of at this point. But it won't be long until the player base is just as jaded as PUBG's: https://github.com/Griizz/Fortnite-Hack

strgrdon Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726214

"Link to this post in three years and ponder in its prescients... Web 3.0 will be born in the death of the heavily botted social networks."

strgrdon [dead]

Keep in mind this is the same guy that invested $10m into Ripcord...

strgrdon NVIDIA GeForce driver deployment in datacenters is forbidden now

NVIDIA GameWorks is probably the most cancerous thing to happen to the gaming industry. Partnering with UE4 to fuck games for AMD at the engine level :(

strgrdon Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide

Cashing in on ML/AI hype machine while simultaneously justifying their extensive personal data vacuum.

strgrdon Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

> Open HN comment section on an article about labor conditions

> Top comment, find a better job

> Every time

strgrdon Using Cryptocurrency Smart Contracts to Sell Shares of My House

When the level of discourse surrounding "blockchain technologies" boils down to the following, it makes you wonder how long it is until you wake up to find the bubble has popped:

"Someone who wants to own a % of a real estate asset in this city could just buy a % share of mine.

Smart contracts via crypto make this super doable."

strgrdon Fiat is Effective: fiat for the crypto crowd [pdf]

I have been trying to keep track of some of the cryptocurrency idiocy on HN, but no one seems to care/get it: reddit.com/r/BoHN/

strgrdon Fiat is Effective: fiat for the crypto crowd [pdf]

Bitcoin isn't the internet of money, it is an internet for money. With this distinction in mind, it would be foolish to think that the first cryptocurrency would be the last. It took many implementations and iterations of wide area networks to arrive at the Internet Protocol we have today.

While Bitcoin doesn't share the same set of problems as fiat currency, it has its own burdens, and has proven completely ineffective as a functional money system outside of speculation and fraud. The novelty of Bitcoin is supposedly its 'immutable ledger', a phrase used so frequently in defending Bitcoin, that it has become divorced from its meaning, and divorced from the reality that solutions to distributed logging existed long before Bitcoin, and many more solutions to this problem will be developed with no regard to the blockchain.

Bitcoin itself will never replace anything -- cryptocurrencies will remain monolithic in purpose and function for a very long time. The underlying ideas to the Bitcoin protocol will be iterated on, and we'll see these ideas implemented in distributed software, but to incessantly hype Bitcoin as the singular platform for cryptocurrency is to live in a bubble.

pls buy litecoin

strgrdon North American Regional Dialects and Accents (2016)

I think it's interesting that this is a map of almost exclusively caucasian accents (as the note on the left explains, information on the distinct African American Vernacular English dialect is not included, partly because the geographical variations of AAVE are largely independent of 'white' dialects).

Googling around, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent map out there for AAVE.

strgrdon Why I Was Fired by Google

You know what is not intelligent discourse? Equating what was said in the memo as harassment by citing this:

> They asked 114 undergraduate female students to watch a video and imagine themselves as bystanders to a situation where a man made either a sexist catcall remark (“Hey Kelly, your boobs look great in that shirt!”) at another woman or simply greeted her (“Hey Kelly, what’s up?”).

Maybe you could provide a citation instead for this?

> the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.

strgrdon DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

I wonder if we will see any advanced cheese strats come out of this. I'm assuming some implementations will eventually develop micro control that is far beyond any human player's capabilities, which would make things like all-in probe rushing much more viable. Instead of playing the normal meta in a computer-vs-human, I imagine an advanced AI would simply send all of its workers off the mineral line as soon as the game starts, and attempt to out micro the human opponent before they can build an army-producing building.

strgrdon Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon review

I'm guessing you didn't make the mistake of paying more for a much hotter CPU...

strgrdon Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon review

If only there were, you know, reviews from reputable publications that included such information.

strgrdon Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon review

Intel i7-7600U @ 2.8GHz

strgrdon Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon review

Looks good on paper, and surprisingly bloat-free stock OS (just the usual Windows 10 crapware), but even with the highest bin kit, my Carbon Gen5 gets hot to the point of being uncomfortable to handle, and starts stuttering with just 5-6 Chrome tabs open. It can play Starcraft 2 for 10-15 minutes (just long enough to run a benchmark!), and then just starts giving up.

strgrdon Building a Music Recommender with Deep Learning

This is a really cool project. The hardest part of DJing is knowing which set of songs have similar sonic profiles, and would mix well together. I would love to see this put to use in personal music collections, or in a Traktor playlist, and be able to sort songs by their similarity.

strgrdon Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

> There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything.

Do you really believe that? Because from the outside, it seems that the only people talking about "blockchain technology" are those who have a significant amount of money invested in it.

This article is a blockchain banking service saying, "hey, other people should use this solve-all technology that is definitely the future too!"

strgrdon Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

Why isn't X working on blockchain technology?

Maybe instead of asking this, we should ask the cryptocurrency enthusiasts what area of technology won't be dropped-and-replaced by blockchains, because so far it seems apparently applicable to every single use case in every single industry... By the way, did you guys hear this thing is an immutable ledger?

strgrdon Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

Reddit, after the great Digg exodus:

> You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”

strgrdon AltspaceVR is Closing Down

How do you monetize a game where there are rarely more than 100 people online? Most of the time it felt like there were more Altspace employees than genuine players. They made serious efforts to curb harassment, but in effect managed to sabotage any chance of spontaneous interaction with other VR strangers. By the time they brought in "campfires", no one played.

Altspace was doomed the moment they decided to fundraise instead of, you know, make money. There was no reason Altspace couldn't have been made by 1-2 people. Instead, they went on a hiring spree, and the game had nothing to show for it. Really, anyone funding the VR space right now is insane: http://vrlfg.net/

strgrdon We Mailed 100K Stickers Around the World, Made a Million Mistakes Along the Way

I was really hoping they were going to mention kerning, because despite the letters appearing perfectly spaced, all I see is "DE V."

strgrdon BTC-e and its founder charged in 21-count indictment over hack of Mt. Gox

> It has always offered strangely convoluted pathways to transfer fiat to financial institutions

Your link is not evidence of "strange convolution." The reason there are so many steps/screenshots is because the payment service is in Russian, and the guide is designed for non-Russian speakers.

Most people never dealt with fiat on BTC-e, and would use someone like Coinbase to fund the purchase of coins, and trade exclusively in crypto on BTC-e.

> Now the top 12 or so volume-ranked Bitcoin exchanges listed at https://cryptowat.ch are perfectly legitimate trustworthy companies.

BTC-e was number six on that list...

strgrdon Breaking open the Mt. Gox case, part 1

I remember a time when BTC-e was the most logical exchange to use, especially in the fallout of MtGox. I really enjoyed how straightforward the exchange was, and how easy it was to get started using their API. I don't think they're coming back after this.

strgrdon Ethereum from Scratch – Part 2: Pinging a Bootnode

> Do you like writing in-depth articles? Ocalog is a platform to help you get paid for it so you can afford to spend time doing it. Consider joining!

Do you really think a reddit/aggregator where you pay-per-upvote (via a subscription service, instead of fiverr like a normal person) is going to encourage long form articles?

I don't think I would pay to be part of a pseudo-oligarchy, but I would pay for an aggregator that couldn't be gamed by bot accounts. This... almost does that.

strgrdon Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

Yes, with this logic, storage rental should expand into the sharing economy. You could rent out a room in your house for strangers to store their stuff in. Not a big step at all.

strgrdon Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]

The same reason I can't take Ethereum seriously. Do people seriously trust, or want an unproven hypervisor running code remotely on their hardware/network?

strgrdon Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

What is your point? Are you implying that people thought electronic music was otherwise difficult or expensive to produce? Did you think people didn't know you could write code to generate sound?

...Or are you just being reductive and showing off your programming knowledge?

strgrdon Show HN: Building a no gimmick smart contract platform as a service

"A gimmick is a novel device or idea designed primarily to attract attention or increase appeal, often with little intrinsic value."

> Contract applications in need of blockchain immutability can store and retrieve data on the Etheruem blockchain

> A new kind of cryptocurrency based on tokenized quantum signatures to use as payment for service offered on the platform.

> Build contract apps that can scale easily. Launch multiple instances and share tasks between them.

And I still can't think of a single use case. Also there's a spelling mistake in the first sentence of the white paper.

strgrdon How can Ethereum systematically scale better?

Randomly generated Finnish names. Seemed appropriate.