Slang term for frequently reloading game state from recent save when a non-ideal outcome occurs. E.g. this method can be used to collect rare outcomes from a RNG-based game event.
Do you like sweets? I noticed as I became an adult sometime in my mid-20s, I stopped liking sweet flavors as much and developed a new appreciation for bitter flavors. Like coffee and some vegetables.
My tastes changed a lot over the years. I quit liking sweets in my early 20s, I rarely even have sugar in the house.
Sometime in my late 30s I started appreciating more nuanced flavors, including black coffee, but mostly vegetables like green beans, tomatoes, asparagus, peas, carrots. Once that happened, I started realizing how much food is blasted with so much salt that obliterates said flavors.
I assume it's mostly normal, as a kid I found my parents tastes bland...ew who could eat vegetables by themselves with no seasoning? Well, me now apparently...
There was a time when my diet was consistently full of very sweet things -- in particular, with beverages: More soda? Another mocha latte swimming in sugar? Another quart of orange juice? Yes, please.
But also food: How can a person walk past a selection of fresh donuts without having one?
Eventually, for reasons that initially were budgetary more than anything else, I discovered some coffee that I really liked the natural flavor of at a local place. I started getting that -- plain, black -- instead of a latte, mostly because $2.10 is a lot less than $3.75.
That coffee was Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. This particular one had its own distinct, subtle sweetness that hit the spot for me and was part of a basically-daily feel-good routine for years until their roaster stopped selling it.
But by then, I was a black coffee convert. And I didn't even notice at the time, but I'd also stopped buying soda in bulk -- it became a rare entity in my life instead of a daily fixation.
I also stopped buying things like cookies and donuts. I began to skip the pie at gatherings.
That all happened in my 30s.
Nowadays, motivated only by what I feel like eating or drinking instead of some desire to make healthy choices or something, my intake is good-tasting spring water (the tap water here sometimes tastes of mud), decent black coffee, inexpensive tea, and [of course] beer.
My food has taken a turn for the bland, too.
I buy carrots and celery at the store to munch on, instead of a bag of cookies. Things like rice and beans and fish have an abundance of flavor that I wasn't able to appreciate before. For gatherings, I make a big relish tray full of fresh vegetables -- and I munch on them more than anyone else does.
I seldom buy breakfast cereal now, but I used to eat a lot of it -- and I'd load it up with more sugar. Last year I did buy some store-brand raisin bran but I found that it was too much of a sugar bomb to really enjoy as a meal. I couldn't make myself finish it; most of it wound up in the compost. (I did find some very plain bran flakes that I liked a lot better -- 12-year-old me would not have been impressed.)
This is all a bit weird to describe because the only deliberate decision involved was to try to save a bit of money on coffee-house coffee in my 30s.
But did that decision actually have anything to do with it? Or is this instead a tale as old as time itself, wherein: Tastes simply change?
(But yeah, I do enjoy an occasional sugar bomb. But only literally-occasionally. For instance: A single 12-ounce bottle of Coke is very nice sometimes. I probably drink as many as 2 or 3 of those in a whole year.)
I've always wanted a deeper, historical explanation rather than just the end result. Like, how did they even arrive at these things I'm memorizing? Who, and why?
I think generative AI has great potential here to enrich learning, not only by having the ability to quickly cross reference history and science, but to compose it with storytelling technique.
Some of the cryptocurrency casinos pioneered having cryptographically signed random sequences that are revealed after the game is over. That way you can confirm that the game was fair. It's not a very popular feature, however, as it's not a major selling point for most people.
I fail to see how that helps considering all digital casinos likely use a similar form of pseudo random number generation and the crypto "guarantees" won't prevent people from using verifiers during play.
I use to play on Full Tilt with guys from work all the time.
Quite often I would be at a table with someone I know and chatting on the side.
We wanted to beat each other though for bragging rights so never colluded. Thinking about what could be done though if sharing card information is really bad. There are so many spots that knowing for certain 2 cards have been removed from the deck would be an absolutely massive advantage.
I can't even imagine the schemes real cheats have come up with.
Yeah I just mentioned this in a different comment. OKC stunned me when it came out because it seemed so interesting and effective. I met my ex-wife on there! Ha.
No. I don’t think so. I think if you took many engineers and sat them at a computer and asked them to stand up a whole dev staging prod system they wouldn’t be able to do it.
I certainly would not, or it would take me a significant amount of time to do properly. I have been a full stack dev for 10 years. Now take that one step further to someone whose only interaction with a development is numpy, pandas, julia, etc…
You are, in typical HN style, minimising the problem into insignificance.
This is /not/ a “stick it behind an aws load balancer and on one of their abstracted services that does 99% of the work for you” - that would be less difficult.
E: love how this is getting ratioed by egotistical self confessed x10 engineers no doubt. Some self reflection is needed on your behalf. Just because /you/ think you would be capable, does not mean that the plethora of others would be able to.
What likely happened here is an ingress rule was set up wrongly on iptables or equivalent.. something many of your fellow engineers would have no clue about. An open dev database is rather normal if you want something out of the door quickly, why would you worry about an internal accessible only tool’s security if you trust your 10 or so staff. Have a think about the startups you have worked in (everyone here is a startup pro, just like you are - remember!) and what dire situation your mvp was in behind its smoke and mirrors PowerPoint slide deck.
Yes this was disastrous for PR. No it is not a problem solved in its entirety entirely by learned engineering experts like yourself.
I would consider it table stakes for an intermediate level engineer at a big company (which would have well defined processes for doing this safely) or a senior at any other company (on the assumption some of that infra has to be set up from scratch). If 10 years of experience hadn’t taught me this yet, I would personally be concerned how I’m spending my energy. I am roughly at the 10y mark, and I would estimate I have been competent enough to build a public facing application without embarrassing public access issues on my own for at least 4 years. Even before that, I would have known what to be scared of / seek help on for at least 7 years. I guess I could be more unusual than I think, but the idea that at 10 years anyone would be ok not knowing how to approach such a routine task is baffling to me.
HN is a bubble. The expectation that your colleagues are /experts like you/ is unrealistic. To stand something up like this, which is entirely on bare metal - this is a task many would find challenging if they are entirely honest with themselves and put their egos to the side. Your typical swe thinks that nothing is impossible.
There was a recent comment which said along the lines of “I used to watch figure skating, seeing them race around and spin, and think no big deal. It was only when I went on ice that I realised how difficult and impressive what they were doing was” - this is exactly the trap SWEs are most guilty of. — /this/ is what you learn as a staff level.
You are talking to the ice skaters.
They expect you to do up your laces. Setting a password on a database is a something I would expect of any company capable of asking for a credit card.
everything you say is true, but I don't think any of it actually applies to being able to safely deploy user facing systems. I would certainly not trust myself to do all possible aspects of setting up a user facing system completely from scratch (ie nothing but a libc on linux or whatever) I would not trust myself to write correct crypto, for example. But I have a good sense of what I can trust myself to build relatively safely. And of course i'm not claiming that "knowledge of where to trust myself" is by any means flawless. But Even in college I made applications for people that were exposed to the public internet. But I was very aware of what I felt I could trust myself to do and what I needed to rely on some other system for. In my case I delegated auth to "sign in with google" and relied on several other services for data storage. There were features that I didn't ship because I didn't trust myself to build them safely, and I was working alone. Now I would not necessarily expect every CS student to be able to do this safely, but a healthy understanding of one's own current limitations and being willing to engineer around that as a constraint is pretty achievable, and can get you very far.
I don’t understand this comment? Is it unusual to request something like this? OP’s comment was saying that all 1000 or so (and hundreds of thousands of others) of his colleagues would be able to do this if asked?
I don’t know if you are in agreement with me or not
I am agreeing with your premise of asking a random s/w technician to deploy an app fairly securely would be problematic and then generalized it to include many tasks related to s/w engineering.
I once used booking.com to book a block of several rooms for a wedding. Paid and confirmed. When we arrived, the hotel had no record of our reservations! The explanation was that their sync with booking.com was prone to failure and hadn't been updating for several weeks and they hadn't noticed. Luckily, they still had enough rooms available for us, but I will never use a 3rd party site again and I will always call ahead to confirm the reservation is still on the books.
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