violentvinyl's comments

violentvinyl | 9 years ago | on: Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transmissions

I would posit that in the US, new drivers are "grand-fathered" in to automatics. There is no driving license restriction in the US for transmission types, so there is little value in learning to drive a manual before your test (you could always learn later if you wanted to). Couple that with the fact that often a new driver's first car is second hand from a more sensible parent or family member who wanted the ease of use of an automatic, repeat for a generation or two, and suddenly you have very few new drivers who even have an opportunitty to learn how to drive a manual.

violentvinyl | 9 years ago | on: How 2K Killed Irrational Games

> So I actually liked it, but because it was so poorly made technically I never bothered to Finnish it. Maybe I'll force my way through it one day, because of the story and atmosphere, but it's frankly one of the worst pieces of gameplay I've ever tried.

I'm a bit late to the party here, but this is where "Let's Play" videos on YouTube are really great. You can get all the bits you want without any of the frustrating gameplay. The trick is just to find a YouTuber you can stand for the duration of the video (Nerd Cubed is one of my favourites, but he would be an acquired taste).

violentvinyl | 9 years ago

I think that's the secret sauce for these quys. I'd be surprised if you can find out a lot about current techniques without signing an NDA and leaving your mobile phone in a box at security.

violentvinyl | 9 years ago | on: Have I Been Pwned? API for R

It's great that they're doing this. We had kicked around the idea of signing up all of our customers for HIBP, but decided against it for obvious reasons. What we would really like to do is to be able to notify our custoemrs when their email addresses show up in breaches. Besides being helpful to our customers (who will mostly not be aware of useful services like HIBP), it would potentially help reduce fraud on our sites.

Is anyone aware of a way to get access to sanitized dumps that we can compare to our customer DB internally? It's unlikely we'd get approval to go out and get the dumps and analyze them ourselves, but if there was a reliable source like HIBP, but for bulk comparison, we could bring a lot of value to the business and to our customers.

violentvinyl | 9 years ago | on: Termination of YouTube Service on 2012 BRAVIA TVs

It's interesting that Smart TVs seem to have two lives, the first as a Smart TV, and the later as a dumb display.

At least in some cars, you can still replace the ICE if it accomodates single or double DIN units. The newer cars with hidden "brains" and a proprietary display though, will that be the equivalent of having an 8-track player mounted under the dash in a few years?

It reminds me of a very good Mitch Hedberg quote: "An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience."

violentvinyl | 9 years ago | on: Prison phones are a predatory monopoly – One family fought back and won

That is true about unpaid labour, but my understanding was that this isn't forced on to the prisoners. I understand that prisoners are given the option to work, and reap various benefits in return (modest pay, extra hours outdoors in the case of road crews, and potentially leniancy for "good behavior" at parole hearings).

violentvinyl | 10 years ago | on: From fleeing Vietnam in a refugee boat to becoming Uber’s CTO

I have a particular interest in truly disruptive start-ups, especially ones thats really flout the law like Uber does. I'm under the impression that conventional entrepeneurial wisdom says "Go ahead and break the rules, by the time they catch up with you or you've gained their attention, you'll have the money or support needed to fight for real change". Of course, all you have to do is look at Zenefits to see this isn't always going to be the case. It makes you wonder what type of person it takes to run a company like that. I relize Thuan isn't the CEO/founder, but when I think about a disruptive business, I weight up the threat of serious fines/jail time against a relatively cushy life with a stable 9 to 5. It's really eye-opening to see what type of person it takes to drive a busines like Uber forward.

violentvinyl | 10 years ago | on: Ten years on LinkedIn

I like the idea of using my LinkedIn page as a way to highlight interesting articles to spark conversation. I'm not aticvely recruiting at the moment (but I do use Linked In when I am), so I could see having already built a "community" of my peers on MY page would beuseful for both recruiting for my current team, and also any future job searches I embark on. Where did you come up with the tweaks for your own page? I'm curious if there is a tutorial for this, or if you just kind of stumbled on to it? I did a little search for "linkedin disable scrolling", hoping to fin a MySpace style skinning tutorial, compelte with embedded HTML, but had no such luck.

violentvinyl | 10 years ago | on: What Developers Should Know About Job Searching and Negotiation

Thank you for this, especially the point about silence. This is such an under-recognized negotiation tactic. I'd venture to say that negotiations often wind up as a contest of "who can bear the silence the longest". I particularly like the suggestion about a stronger statement when making a counteroffer.

It's very refreshing to hear this advice from an agency recruiter, because they are indeed maligned here and elsewhere. Part of the problem I think, is that the incentives of the recruiter are rarely aligned with the candidate.

violentvinyl | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Feels like my brain doesn't want to work anymore

I'd like to add my 2 pence to the notion of gaming to relax.

For someone who isn't a regular gamer, it isn't a relaxing thing to do. It's frustrating to have to master new controls, and every new game mechanic requires some kind of mental gymnastics, not to mention the hand-eye co-ordination to master.

For people who have, or do play games with some regularity, it is a great way to relax. New control schemes have a very shallow learning curve, and it's rare that a regular gamer encounters an entirely new game mechanic.

For example, my father in law was playing a COD game after not having played video games for many, many years, and was stuck at a certain point. After watching him sit through a brief cut scene, and then furiously mash the buttons on the controller, I intuitively realized what he was doing wrong. He was trying to "play the game" as he normally did, but didn't notice the little button icon at the bottom of the screen to signify a quick time event, and had never seen one before either. As a result, he was hitting the wrong button, only to watch the cut scene finish with his character dieing (he admitted to having sat through this 20+ times).

I myself, will often play games for a few hours after my wife has gone to bed, and on more than one occassion, I've complained about not having the energy to do anything prodcutive after the evening meal, and she likes to say something to the tune of "but you play video games for hours?". For her, playing video games is a tense, mind racing activity that requires lots of thought and manual dexterity. For me, it's little more than an interactive story with the occassional challenge (and they're usually bested after a second attempt, even at harder skill levels) and allows me to tune out for a bit before bed.

violentvinyl | 10 years ago | on: Why You Love That Ikea Table, Even If It's Crooked (2013)

Ikea's aesthetic is not just some designer's idea of what nice-looking furniture is, it's actually designed to be flat packed. The raw materials that go into the product ARE cheaper for Ikea (particle board vs. hard woods), but not by leaps and bounds (unless you get in to the more exotic hardwoods). Flat pack is also cheaper to warehouse and distribute, and your custmers can come and collect it and build it themselves. Mid to high end furniture often has more intricate joints and curves, and is probably cut by machine, but assembled by hand in a factory.

TL;DR: You'd have trouble producing furniture in other, more traditional styles that could also be flat packed and assembled at home by the average consumer at a reasonable price point.

violentvinyl | 10 years ago | on: Repair is a Radical Act

The inclusion of DeWalt got me thinking, because I own several DeWalt power tools. Arguably, these are contractor grade tools made to stand up to some abuse. I buy them because it's a well regarded brand name (for the reason above), but typically only after I've validated my need for a specific tool by breaking a cheap one from repeated use. Truth be told, I've never thought about having to repair it (which I could probably do, because I do know there are parts available for them) or sending it off for repair, because even after owning some of them for 10+ years and subjecting them to countless loanings and abuse, none of them have failed on me.

I agree that there is a trade off, but I think it is this: I bought from a respected brand, so that in the event of failure, I can bring it back to the manufacturer (who will probably still be in business), and they can/will fix it (often under an extended warranty, and it's also not unheard of to find tool manufacturers specifically that will repair or replace tools under a lifetime warranty) rather than say something to the effect of "well, we can't fix that, you'll need to buy a new one". If the cost to me as a consumer for this privelege is that they feel the need to take measures that might prevent someone without the right tools from taking it apart so that they can ensure some revenue to keep their parts/repair services running, than I'm okay with that (as long as they aren't trying to sue people for making repairs).

This whole thing conjures up the Apple mindset of providing a consistent user experience, and locking down a device to ensure that consistency. Unfortunately, a combination of factors (outdated legal frameworks, pricing models, etc.) seem to conspire against people who want both a quality product manufactured to a high standard and the ability to tinker and repair (ie. HN users).

violentvinyl | 10 years ago | on: Fallout 4 Service Discovery and Relay

I really like this idea, but one of the big "improvements" for me in the scavanging system (given that I didn't play New Vegas, which I believe implemented some of this) is that it's no longer just about weight to value ratio, and it's also about rare components (screws, gears, etc.) for weapon mods. For this to be useful to me, it would need a customizable "hit list" of crafting components as well.

Am I the only person who collects lots of stuff early in a quest, runs out of room when I find better stuff, then drops a bunch of it in a locker/cigarette machine/corpse near the front door in the hopes that I'll stumble across it later (current return rate = 0)?

violentvinyl | 10 years ago | on: 'Power Over Wi-Fi' named one of the year's game-changing technologies

This got me excited about the idea. Like many others my first thought was that it can't be nearly efficient enough to charge my phone, but I hadn't even considered all the little low power sensors I could place around the house that I wouldn't bother with if they all needed to be wired into mains power. Think window break and door lock sensors, etc.

violentvinyl | 10 years ago | on: FCC: We aren’t banning DD-WRT on Wi-Fi routers

It's interesting (depressing) to me, that the FCC thinks that hardware vendors should be responsible for what their hardware does once it leaves their hands. If we applied the same logic to other industries, there wouldn't be a firearm manufacturer left in the USA.

Is this an actual problem? Are there people running DD-WRT in a way that is wreaking havoc on other communications? I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have played with DD-WRT, and I've worked with hundreds of geeks in my career. It feels like the FCC is trying to regulate a problem that doesn't exist yet, and it makes me wonder what the motivation behind it is.

violentvinyl | 10 years ago | on: Activision to Buy King Digital for $5.9B

I can't help but wonder how much this has to do with the style of game. As far as software enforced rules go, Draw Something is VERY open, where a game like Candy Crush only accepts input that moves the game in the direction of their choosing (towards purchases usually). Most of my experience with Draw Something comes from watching a child play, and by "play", I mean they would write the word out. I failed to find a way to convincingly explain that this ruins the game. At 8 years old, it's extremely difficult to explain why someone should be following rules that the software doesn't enforce.
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