skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great explanation of DF's bodily combat damage modeling: http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/95316-complex-dama...

> DF's damage system is just as complex and oftentimes difficult to keep track of as the rest of the game. Instead of simple health points or separate body parts DF simulates each individual by the sum of it's parts. This starts at the single parts of a body, then adds layers of tissue, muscle and fat to each part, connects all parts by joints and finally stuffs a share of vital and nonvital organs into the whole thing. Every part of this construct has several states it can be it, reaching from healthy over bruised, torn, mangled, nonfunctional, broken and missing...

> How does that play out in the actual game? Depending on what kind of injury a creature suffers it tracks the damage to individual body part and the results of it. Slashing damage will cut through tissue, muscle and fat, might even separate body parts, blunt damage will pass through protective clothing and only bruise upper layers, but shatter bones and joints mercilessly. Piercing damage will effortlessly penetrate all layers and has a high chance to damage.

A dwarf is graphically represented by a smiley face, so you can't see any of this happen. All of it is conveyed by descriptive text.

It's also recommended to pick up a freshman textbook on geology to understand the game's many types of rocks, which is apparently pretty realistic following Tarn's personal interest in geology/mineralogy. The depth of this "game" is breathtaking. The only thing I can think of comparable might be high-fidelity but consumer grade flight simulators like X-Plane, or those put out by Russian developer DCS (e.g. http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/series/black_shark/... )
I actually got bored towards the end of my first game of DF because it was too easy.

The interface adds a lot of illusory difficulty, but that's not an issue for people used to reading manuals. On the other hand, when you're not wrestling with the system, there's not much fair challenge. When your underground fortress is filled to the brim with traps and completely self sufficient, no one is ever going to touch you unless you handicap yourself.

Once I had my base built out the way I wanted it, there wasn't much left for me to do. Kind of reminds me of how Minecraft feels once you've built a satisfying shelter, but I think that Minecraft's music and FPS perspective can motivate people to keep playing for the sake of creativity. With DF: sure, it's fun to imagine my fortress and all, but then I might as well move away from the keyboard and just do the whole thing in my imagination.
Wiggle Stereography in your Browser
DF is like a simulated fantasy world that runs in real-time. It is a combination of strategy, sandbox, and roguelike. Similar at first appearance to other roguelikes, but a very different playing experience. I am a fairly avid NetHack player and I have spent a lot of time playing DF as well, so there is definitely a common appeal. They are both incredibly challenging, and just learning to play them makes you feel like you've accomplished something.

Edit: there is also an "adventurer" mode in DF, which is a straight-up roguelike, where you can go and, for example, explore old fortresses you built. It is fun, but last time I played, it was still very rough and most of the focus had gone into the fortress-building side of things. I know that Toady spent a lot of time building a more dynamic roguelike experience a year or so ago.
"I can't come into the office and goof off with you guys" has always been my feeling for people who want fewer WFH days
You can stream past seasons on Amazon Instant Video and iTunes.
I disagree on one point, food. When working at an office I tend to eat out and just generally be unhealthy. Working from home allows me more time to cook meals and be healthier in general.
It can also be implemented using "Access Restriction" like this http://imgur.com/0sdc0CI
True, sans all the Firefox branding and such they could do that without Mozilla's consent. With how Verizon went out of their way to ensure their Galaxy S3 was the only one that prevented users for easily unlocking the bootloader and enabling system writing, I don't foresee a positive future with any open OS on Verizon. I'm probably switching to T-Mobile when my contract is up next year. I enjoy the unlimited LTE dataspeed on Verizon I still have, but I'm not interested in keeping it while paying full price for a phone I don't really want.
I was just curious. I would hope RoR would be able to handle more than 60 requests per minute. Nowadays I don't bother with manual replicated servers, cloud servers handle a lot of those problems, but I understand everyone has their reasons.
It's hard to get into, but if you deal with vim/emacs/etc on a normal basis, the learning curve shouldn't be a big deal (unless you don't have time for it).

The game is just like vim/emacs in that you don't know what you don't know and you're likely going to learn piecemeal.

If you looked through a couple tutorials and said "Hey I think I get the hang of it now" and start cracking at your first mountain, you'll quickly realize that you have no idea how to craft, deal with rooms, plant stuff, etc.

As far as the graphical elements of the interface goes, there's a number of tilesets to use[1] which make the game exponentially more enjoyable.

Also, there's a fellow on YouTube by the name of captnduck[2] and, aside from the official wiki, he's probably been the most helpful source for me when it comes to DF. I suggest taking a look at a video or two from him if DF interests you.

[1] http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/117975/dwarf-fortr...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL06686270DA5FF439
>fairly hard not to go insane at home

You have to chitchat plenty, and you have to do lunches out a couple times a week, etc, and have social interaction in the evenings.
Pricing the PS4, or Skip the Wait and (Kinda) Build One Yourself
NovaHackers ShmooCon Epilogue Videos
If you think NetHack is the greatest computer game of all time, may I suggest Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup? Supposedly, it was modeled after NH, but in attempt to fix several of its problems: http://crawl.develz.org/other/manual.html#n-philosophy-pas-d...
Dwarf Fortress is not in the same league as NetHack. Dwarf Fortress is possibly an order of magnitude of leagues above NetHack in complexity, depth, and replayability. While I've probably spent a comparable amount of time playing both games over the years so far (on the order of +80 hours), I expect to spend far more of my life playing Dwarf Fortress as it continues to mature.
Too many words to express a worn out platitude: "See every day as an opportunity to learn something that you didn't know yesterday".

Here's the only part of the article that I really agree with: "Don't waste your time hating your job and doing it badly." That right there is the real reason why hating your shitty job only makes it worse: because you're wasting your time hating it, instead of looking for a way to either change it or quit.

As for the idea that "at the very least you'll make your days more pleasant with a positive attitude", I wish I could construct and program an army of little robots whose only task would be to kick the people who spout this crap in their shins.

If you subscribe to this "positive thinking will solve all your problems" mantra, I encourage you to watch this RSA Animation of a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich: http://y2u.be/u5um8QWWRvo

Finally, I'd like to answer the last question in the article. Did I enjoy this article? No, I didn't, because it had too much emphasis and I found that very annoying.
How do you debug this kind of problem?
Better TL;DR:

The author points out that the meaning has changed over time from the initial meaning of "superuser" to "switch user", due to feature creep.
Following the Captnduck tutorials [1] and using the Lazy Newb pack [2] got me pretty far.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHVZtRdtPdo
[2]: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0
If it's too easy, dig deeper.
There is no guild for the companies that produce VFX work.

VFX studios do the work as work-for-hire, so if a film does poorly they don't loose money, but they never ever get any of the profits if a movies does do well. At the most simplified level - it's a loosing business model.

There's a very small set of "consumers" and there are more producers (vfx shops).

The bid amount for work that is awarded is a tightly guarded secret (this hurts transparency).
Regardless, at a coarse level if tax subsidies (in Canada or the UK for example) allow your competition to under bid you by 20 million on a 60 million dollar set of work where your normal bid is for profit margin of 3% you are screwed.

VFX today is labor intensive. There is still a great deal of creative specialty skills involved, but outside of vfx they don't even quite realize how easy or hard an effect is to create and thus they view outsourcing of all work as a "sure and natural thing"

This year Life of Pi won the vfx oscar, and the work was done by a company in LA that just went bankrupt (Sigh, it hurts to think about Rhythm and Hues). If you watched the award show, just as the people accepting the award were about to mention R&H they were played off the stage. Film producers do _not_ want to even acknowledge how the industry works :).

As a long term career choice you do _not_ want to work in vfx. The people who work in VFX are the funniest, most passionate, and creative sorts I've ever worked with, but it's an industry that is going through "change" (as in, disappearing).
>> In Germany everything is dubbed

OT: I've seen a few of these dubbed shows across Europe and Asia. And you know what I found fascinating? Most of these dubbed shows from Europe are done really well. Of particular note is how much pains go in choosing the the dialogues in order to lip-sync with how the original is spoken (Check some HK action films to see the contrast (-;)...

>> who sounds like the most uninteresting guy

In most cases, I noticed they take pains to get similar sounding actors/actresses from the original, perhaps this was one of those occasional poor choices.
I disagree that static language users will want an IDE. I'm a static-typing advocate, but I much prefer vim over IDEs.

Then again, I design static-type systems in my spare time, so maybe I'm not the target of your comment :)
O'Reilly has a book for this: "Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress"

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022565.do

Looks good so far, although I'm not more than a chapter into it yet.
Ecclesiastes 9:10 is more concise.
Thank you! I used script. Certain implementations have an option to emit timing and byte count data on stderr. Then it's just a matter of saving it and building something to honor those delays during playback.
> why the class is named Hash instead of HashMap

Why in golang is a function denoted by func instead of function?

I'd guess it's because programmers prefer fewer keystrokes as long as the term remains sufficiently mnemonic.
There is much evidence that commuting is bad for mental health

http://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/151.html
If you ever find your Dwarf Fortress game to be too boring, keep digging deeper. There are many sources of entertainment located far underground.
I'm with TWC, and holy crap, now 1080p quality works just fine, whereas most of the time 720p would take forever to buffer. I'm on a 20/2 mbit plan, and it was ridiculous before this fix.
Even Rubyists always use 2 spaces, no tabs, even though whitespace is (mostly) insignificant.
Thanks Thomas. I appreciate it.
I am not a user, but HBO Go does not strike me as any less of a "modern medium" than Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Instant.
It's the media selector set to mobile sizes, so for responsive design, that is the equivalent.
Squeeze a Lime 5,000 times and we will launch
We will only launch if our lime is squeezed 5,000 times. Beta test commencing tomorrow
It's not a programming issue per se, it's a human issue. Rake provides a nice baseline for throwing all your quickie scripts into little functions that end up with reasonable (if basic) command line interfaces for free.

Those quickie scripts inevitably grow more complicated as the project goes on (usually because the project itself gets more complicated over time) and before long you've outgrown Rake. Except that since Rake is just Ruby it tricks you into thinking you haven't outgrown it!

I started noticing it when I was taking a bunch of time deciding in what order I should be putting the optional parameters to my Rake tasks such that it was most convenient to the user and spending way to much code validating those arguments and setting defaults when I realized that I could've written a script using 'optparse' that would easier to document, easier to use, and easier to write and modify.

There's a graph you could make where the X axis is size of the script and the Y axis is complexity (or maybe "effort"). The Rake line, drawn on this graph, starts near 0,0 but climbs and a nice steep rate. Make starts at basically the same spot as Rake but climbs way faster. A standalone command-line script starts a bit higher on the Y axis, but is flatter over all. The point at which the Rake (or Make) and the script lines meet is where you should switch to a standalone script.

With Make, this happens fairly early on when things are still relatively simple. So you convert your bash commands into a Ruby script and you end up better off in the long run. With Rake it happens so late that converting to a standalone script becomes a very large undertaking and nobody wants to do it (because it still works--why mess with it?). Over the long haul it becomes a pain point.
I've only played NetHack a few dozen times, but it seems to me that Dwarf Fortress is an evolution of NetHack and far more complex.

There are many experiences I've had in Dwarf Fortress that were particularly vivid. A polar bear stalking my woodcutter, but evading my warrior across the arctic tundra. A master engraver carving the story of a dwarven child who went mad. Purple gas saturating the grave room and leaking into the halls when my dwarves were being massacred by kobolds. Good friends celebrating in the great room, drinking while admiring the mist (the fortress was built into the back of a waterfall, and mist makes dwarves happy). The clumsy blacksmith and shy carpenter who lived in their corner of the mine, happily married and rarely taking food with the other dwarves. The cats. The dragon.

"Short, sturdy creatures fond of drink and industry."
Probably, yes. If you hung out in #rubinius over the last year, you'd see Alex Gaynor hanging out.
I'm on TWC and this fix with iptables just made a massive difference. Whether it's throttling or not, I'm very impressed with the results.
So the lives of thousands and thousands of men is better than say... a referendum?
As much as many people seem to hate the way Objective-C does things, I really like how it intersperses the arguments in the function name. It makes it so easy to identify parameters.

Most languages:

someObject.throwProduce(apple, myEnemy, 14, 17);

Objective-C:

[someObject throwProduce:apple at:myEnemy withForceInN:14.0 maxDisanceInM:17.0];

As long as you name the function appropriately, it's clear what each parameter does without having to look up the name. Many people complain about the long names (in this case throwProduce:at:withForceInN:maxDistanceInM:thenWaitInMS:), but it avoids the situation you have in other languages where there are 4 functions with the same name but different signatures. In Obj-C the naming conventions discourage such ambiguity and encourage self-documenting names.
DryWallGall: https://www.youtube.com/user/drywallgall/videos

The gentleman in the video is Laurier. I sent him a message on FB thanking him for the videos, he is extremely friendly. There is actually a neat story behind the videos. The current playlist is slightly different than the original set. A while back someone paid him to take the original series offline for six months (under the theory that they were too helpful). Laurier took him up on his offer and when he put them back online the playlist was slightly different but still remarkably helpful. I am an order of magnitude faster now when I rock a room. The biggest change for me was using the concrete trowel instead of the normal 4/6/12 inch mud knife. That being said I did pick up a number of tips from all of the videos. The only thing I cannot do is freehand cuts with a tape measure and a blade, I still use the T.

I would suggest watching the entire playlist once before your next project starts and then watch the relevant video before each step as a refresher. I used to dread any project that involved drywall. When I do "habitat for humantiy"-esque projects now I try my hardest to be on the rocking team.

EDIT:

If you are skeptical about watching all the videos my big ah-ha moment came when I understood "mud control." This is a nice example:

http://youtu.be/kPIIWGqzmRw?t=3m6s
The author's problems all have solutions

Well, no, those are symptoms, not problems. The problem, as explained by the author, is the sheer improbability of discovering how to play Dwarf Fortress by trial and error. (I say that as a big fan of the game... I've put in a few dozen hours over the years, which I feel is just barely enough to put me at the high end of "beginner").
yeah I noticed youtube buffers are mad slow on FiOS these couple weeks.
Can you SSH into your router and do an `iptables --list` ? I'm thinking that implementation uses the L7 chain. If that's the case then it may be a hair bit quicker using my implementation. Also, the REJECT rule is a bit cleaner than just dropping the packet, which I also suspect to be the case with "Access Restriction" implementation.
TWC customer from NYC here.

I tried adding the ip ranges in article and it rendered youtube inoperable for me. No matter what quality setting I used nothing would stream. Removed the rules and youtube streamed again, albeit slow as ever (still cant stream 720 & 1080)

I can't stand this ISP and I have no alternative available to me here. Talk about living in misery.
Who Has the Guts for Gluten?
I have to admit I cringe a little when I see a recent college grad who is literally only aware of what he learned in his classes. I've been a developer now for 12 years and have interacted with college grads frequently. I can honestly say, the grads who never programmed until CS 101, and only ever programmed for their classes are almost always inferior to their counterparts who explored, experimented and maintained a genuine curiosity of what's out there. Software changes so rapidly, and it always will. You simply must keep abreast of it, at least a little bit. For sure maintain other hobbies and balance your life, but this industry does demand a bit more just by its nature.
TL;DR: Legacy code with gotos in it.
I lost so much time to that game. I would probably recommend it.
Agree, but would add that sometimes the reason you hate the job is in part because there are some other factors. I used to completely deny that my problems with work were anything other than my sucky job. Then I switched jobs, and the problems didn't go away. Here are some things that cause problems that can make a job (good or bad) seem terrible:

* Depression - maybe a parent died, maybe you had someone hurt you (mentally), maybe you just feel like you can't escape your profession but have no idea what else you could do, maybe you can't even find a way to function properly

* Being overweight- even if you aren't obese, some people have more adverse effects than others and doctors will gloss it over saying you are "within normal range"

* Sleep problems- sleep apnea - do the breathe right strips, sleep study, CPAP (greatest chance of working, but didn't work for me), dental appliance, and several made-for-T.V. products that don't work. Axe all caffeine, then you feel like you can't concentrate, etc.

* Attention issues- whether you've got ADD, ADHD, other executive processing or other processing issues, it really sucks. If you feel like you're doing all you can, you can try to just write down the items you need to do that are immediate vs. not, you can add sites you need to ignore to /etc/hosts to point at localhost, etc. but if you have some of these issues, you just aren't going to do what others do. Just switching jobs may put you into an even worse position.

* Past history- some people have really awful family situations. Unfortunately when you grow up in a toxic environment, you may have to work 1000x times harder and may just have to accept that you'll always have that pain and just have to manage it.

So, WTF are you supposed to do? Don't give up. Do try to work on the issues, and looking for another job is good. Try to fix the health stuff. Do what you can to enforce healthy behavior, but don't do diets- you will lose weight maybe even for months, and then you'll be even more overweight. Find some way to exercise that you like and doesn't make you uncomfortable. Hang out with friends and do things that you enjoy, and if you can, try to get better at them. No matter what it is, there is a chance you could make a business out of it, or at least a fun hobby. Just don't hurt yourself or anyone else doing it.

Anyway- I still dislike what I do. But I know eventually things will get better, and I know how to get better. It's just a matter of doing it.
Not the exact title of the article linked. The original title is "Is Your Local Police Department Using Pictures of Pregnant Women and Children for Target Practice?" It's a mildly interesting topic and not at all disturbing. shrug
> However, it means that you now have a close() method which you have to call on every exit path, because if you miss a path, that's a path which could have an exception thrown from a destructor.

Not true at all. `close` and the destructor should be idempotent. In the main path, `close` will get called and failure will propogate upward. In any other failure path, the destructor will attempt to perform the underlying close and allow the stack to unwind without any further interruption.

Of course, anyone can come up with pathological cases where this is not acceptable behavior from a high-reliability sub-component. And in such a situation, RAII may not be the best answer (nor would lexical scoping i.e. constructor/destructor, for that matter!) But in my experience, this approach is just fine for most application-level code.
On Comcast (Boston area) most videos are coming from 208.117.0.0/16 (ish) although some coming from the mentioned blocks.

Interestingly for me the domain the videos are coming from are all of the same general form:

> r1.sn-jvhj5nu-p5qd.c.youtube.com (where the bit before c.youtube.com varies)

Where as the reddit discussion has domains of the form:

> o-o---preferred---sn-mv-p5qe---v17---lscache1.c.youtube.com

The inclusion of the 'preferred' and 'cache' bit are somewhat interesting.

I did find that if I block 208.117.0.0/16 as well as the other two mentions blocks (173.194.55.0/24, 206.111.0.0/16) then no youtube videos will load at all.

I would venture a guess that blocking the mentioned ranges is just forcing you to the 208.117.0.0/16 CDN.
Hi, ex-youtube video eng here. (also posted this as a comment on the blog post)

A while ago YouTube put together a speed information page that you could use to check out your download speeds as well as compare to other isps in your area:

http://www.youtube.com/my_speed

I'm also on Time Warner, and my graph shows wild inconsistencies - sometimes it spikes up to much faster than others, sometimes it's way below the average speed, and it also shows that Time Warner is the slowest provider out of all of the NYC area ISPs.

I wish it was easier to switch to another provider out here.
Because most of the time, your cable alternatives are DSL, satellite or dial-up. They all suck even worse.