When people notice an influential employee that works at a company is active in a community, that presents them with an opportunity to talk to a living breathing person that might actually respond to questions that they feel have been ignored by official channels. People ask questions like this all the time. Unfortunately, sometimes its the only way to get someone at a company to actually help you.
In a different thread someone recommended charging a small fee for new accounts to prevent abuse. Dang responded that its important for everyone to be able to participate. Between his response and this article I reflected quite a bit about the nine years I have spent on this site, the various weird and mostly wonderful interactions I've had with the community, and the way it has shaped my career and therefore my life.
On this site I have received legitimately profound and sometimes life changing advice and insights from a wider variety of people than I have interacted with in any other format: schizophrenics, the homeless, people from a wide variety of cultures (wealthy and impoverished), and industry rock stars.
There have been disagreements and occasionally arguments. Some of them have made me a little more aware of my own bubble and allowed me to recognize aspects of my world view that were ignorant or that at least failed to consider different points of view.
Much of this was possible because its a place that values the participation of everyone. Articles like this excellent piece of writing shine a light on how important it is.
Edit: I figured some shadow banned people would respond. I was actually talking about at least one person that ended up getting permanently banned that happened to be an influential person to me. Part of what makes this community great is that while we can have heated disagreements we largely do it more civilly than many other online communities. While its an accurate assessment that Hacker News has a liberal bias there are lots of conservatives here that freely share their opinions civilly. They might feel outnumbered and they might sometimes be unjustly downvoted by people that don't understand what a downvote button should be used for, but they are largely able to participate because they keep it civil. I'm pretty politically moderate myself. By no stretch of the imagination could I be considered a "SJW" or a person with a typical San Francisco political outlook (only mentioning these phrases because that was what was alleged to be the only type of person that can exist here). Out of curiosity I took a look at jrcii's account and they were indeed needlessly toxic on a large number of occasions before being banned and yet was still told if they email the admin and promise to be civil they can be reinstated. Instead of taking them up they decided be even less civil. A community can be open to everyone and still ban people that are not acting in good faith.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I am so grateful that HN exists. As much as I try to contribute and offer my thoughts and views, I certainly get so much more from it than I could possibly give.
Unfortunately it is not true in general that the reason accounts are being banned is incivility. Censorship of unwanted opinions is very much real on this site.
Disagree completely, and I am far to the right of what I suspect the average hacker news member would be politically. Certainly opinions on the right get heavily downvoted, but that’s not censorship. Dang has corrected me a number of times for incivility, but he has never touched any of my posts because I happen to lean in the opposite direction of my colleagues here.
There is a flag in your profile called "showdead" that you can turn on to see the comments that have been deleted. There might be some minimum karma requirement for this, I'm not sure.
But I've had it on for a while now and I usually read a few of the dead comments. I see a lot of incivility, inanity, very little in the way of a politely expressed, well-thought out but unpopular opinion.
I didn't claim that incivility does not also exist. And the banned accounts don't show up in showdead anymore, either. What you consider "well-thought out but unpopular opinion" could also be subject to your personal biases.
Its possible that it happens, but from my admittedly limited anecdotal experience from seeing a half dozen or so people claim that they were banned for no reason and then taking a look at their comment history, they were absolutely banned for a reason.
Do you have an example of someone being banned simply because they shared an unpopular opinion?
Also "not true in general" implies that you seem to think that its a widespread problem and banning people simply for having an alternative opinion is one of the more common reasons people are banned. On HN that is something I find hard to believe.
But that's the thing -- I'm a woman in tech. How am I political? I'm just a sack of cells like you. Are you a political topic?
To get back to the parent posters, that's why I keep coming back to HN despite the unfortunately-now-expected friction of, well, comments like the one above me. (And timeeater, to be really clear, I don't care your position on feminism or socialism. The friction is that you label me talking a "political topic".) The conversation here is overall good enough to outweigh that, and I have learned a lot from conservatives/Julia programmers/people who've experienced homelessness/infosec people/homebrewers on HN.
Huh what makes you think that I think you are political because you are a "woman in tech"?
Women in tech is political when it comes along with the unfounded claim that there are so few women in tech because of sexism.
I didn't label you anything, I wasn't even aware of your username appearing in the comment thread. I only answered to comments, not to people.
You as a "woman in tech" could become political if you started claiming special rights or special insights or demand special treatment because of your status as woman in tech.
But this is silly. I was born with what I was born with. Why do I have to think about it? What choice did I have in it? Religion, I can choose. Politics, I can choose. Gender? That's not my choice. To the extent it's my identity, it's forced upon me. Thanks, guys.
In this thread, I'm responding to timeeater's claim that it's censorship, not incivility, that results in banning. As evidence, timeeater says that criticising feminism is 'not allowed' or suppressed. But I would argue that it's not criticism of feminism that gets timeeater in trouble, but instead the tendentious supposition that discussing women at all is "political" (to quote, "But there are political topics on HN all the time (women in tech, worker unions at Amazon, and so on and so on)."). Then timeeater goes on to make some statements about special treatment and special insights. Now that's the rabbithole of wasted pixels that Paul Graham is getting at in his essay -- it's really not germane to the discussion, and it's all bound up in an identity that is indeed chosen.
You misinterpret my statement, that is all. I mentioned "women in tech" as an example, because those articles are usually political. They tend to be about alleged discrimination and demands for special treatment of women in tech. That is politics (special treatment of a specific group of people is a policy).
If you don't do any of those things, your person is not a political issue.
Also I didn't say you shouldn't be allowed to post political things like "women in tech". Hacker News policy says that, and bans people for commenting on such threads under the pretense of the policy.
Stop misinterpreting my comments.
And nobody is forcing you to use your body for politics. You don't have to identify as a feminist, either. Feminism is not synonymous with women.
>I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage.
People have ben telling them this for years. They know and do not give a shit or at the very least they are powerless to do anything. The redesign is so bad I'll stop using reddit completely if they ever kill the old domain. Its almost like they intentionally tried to make the least functional website possible.
Nope, it’s rapey, and you are forgetting the fact that a person can only give consent when sober. If someone is drunk then they don’t have the power to say yes. According to that quote anyone who asks for sex from the intoxicated person should just do it. That is rape. Lawyered!
I think you're taking it too literally, you can manipulate lots of quotes to turn them into something they weren't intended to be.
Pretty sure the quoted person wasn't promoting the rape of intoxicated people.
I think the intent was not wasting your time on being rejected by people who aren't even in a position to give you what you are asking for because they don't ever have the authority or power to grant it. That makes more sense than viewing it as an excuse to prey on people that are temporarily in a disadvantaged condition.
I spent more time with videogames than encarta. However, trying to get pc games to run in the 90s taught me how to troubleshoot computers. When I had Internet access I still played a lot of videogames but I also learned a ton of stuff from poking around on websites. The Internet taught me networking, programming, digital forensics and lots of other useful stuff.
Luckily my father introduced me to the first one as a kid. However, likely also due to being eclipsed by Wolfenstein 3d, I didn't even know there was a sequel.
I think you are on to something about the impact being forced to use your imagination has. Quake 1 had amazing art direction and each chapter had its own feel because each of them was designed by a different dev following his own ideas.
I think perhaps the biggest reason why Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal don't feel "creepy" like the old games is because they are completely missing the point. The newer games are fun, beautiful, well designed games. However, instead of making a game that captures the essence of Doom its more like a Michael Bay version of Doom. Instead of desperately fighting never ending hordes of increasingly horrifying creatures from hell so you can get out in one piece and save the world, you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons for lulz. The whole way the story makes it seem like its a foregone conclusion that you've won. Its not a struggle, its just you punishing the hordes of hell that are powerless to stop you.
Aesthetically they nailed the look of the creatures although as you pointed out less can be more. The sound track is good but at some point the composer was consumed by his own pretentiousness (IMO Dusk's composer that replaced him produces far better "Doom" music). The combat is fun and if it wasn't a Doom game it would still be rightly lauded as one of the best shooters of the generation, but glory kills annihilate the flow of the game IMO and detract from any authentic feeling it may have had. Glory kills feel like shortened, dumbed-down quick time events that you're supposed to spam the entire time you play and quick time events always feel bad.
They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me.
I mean its literally a Doom game, but the franchise has clearly lost something and I feel like a lot of the people that preach about how authentically they captured the experience might be too young to have bothered to play it.
Doom II: Hell On Earth is IMO one of the top 5 games of all time. Quake 1 is also on the list. I hope some day we get proper remakes or spiritual successors that capture not just the aesthetic, but the feel and the point of the original games.
Dusk was a decently sized step in the right direction.
People flipped out when Doom 3 ended up being low light horror game and not a fast paced shooter.
Heck the lore of the Doom is that the protagonist is the 'Doom of demonkind'. Its the game where you are not locked in room with demons but they are locked in room with you.
> you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons
That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.
Tldr: The doom marine was entangled with 'hell' and at some stage was tricked that his dead son could be brought to life by a some demon deal - he came back as twisted undead. Doomguy got really angry and his anger propelled him to destroy all that is hell.
> They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me.
I have some mixed feelings about Doom Eternal as it sometimes feels like a puzzle and bit gamey. But Doom 2016 is quite literally a modernised version of Doom 1.
You've got the lore a little mixed up. Doom Guy was mad that the demons killed his rabbit Daisy after they invaded, and ended up voluntarily staying in Hell to kill demons after saving Earth. The Betrayer's son is the one who was resurrected as the Icon of Sin.
It feels like a generational thing, too. My aunt and uncle showed me the 1932 production of "The Mummy," and it terrified them. They were born in the 40s, and so saw this movie in their teens. (and perhaps even later) I watched it recently, and can't even imagine being scared.
I'd like to think that there is both an objective and subjective aspect to this. On the one hand, maybe people just can't appreciate the older styles of art. On the other hand, after being exposed to modern violence, cinematography, and suspense, the old techniques truly do pale in comparison, at least in the visceral, emotional sense.
I wonder how much of the difference is attributable to sensitivity (or lack thereof) to the art/medium/representation, and how much is due to the fact that the fears addressed by the work of art were more relatable to people at the time than they are to a modern audience.
My mom found "The Exorcist" truly frightening, so much so that she refused to re-watch it in adulthood. So my friend and I rented it one night looking forward to a good scare; instead, we mostly found ourselves laughing at how ridiculous it seemed. We must have been around 12 at the time, so probably already quite desensitized to horror movies in general, but I think it is also the case that the subject matter was just less frightening to us than it was to her. We were all raised Catholic, but she was of the stern-nuns-with-rulers generation whereas our elementary school in the 90's had been of the hippie-nuns-with-guitars variety. I don't think things like demons/the devil had ever felt like real objects of fear for us like they may have been for her (in such a deep way that their representation continued to creep her out long after she stopped believing in their literal existence).
Granted, I was a teen in the 90s, but I never found Doom to be scary. However, Wolfenstein 3D left me an anxious wreck -- likely because the AI always (seemed to?) know where you were. (I also didn't get to play Wolf3d until DOOM had already come out, so I don't think it's related.)
>People flipped out when Doom 3 ended up being low light horror game and not a fast paced shooter.
A game can have a creepy aesthetic and even scare people without being a slow paced survival game where you walk around awkwardly pointing at things with a flashlight. The early games had creepy vibes at many different parts of the game. If you disagree to each his own.
> you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons
> That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.
> But Doom 2016 is quite literally a modernised version of Doom 1.
Not really, here's the final paragraphs to the introduction to Doom 1 from the original manual:
> Things aren't looking too good. You'll never navigate off the planet on your own. Plus, all the heavy weapons have been taken by the assault team leaving you only with a pistol. If only you could get your hands around a plasma rifle or even a shotgun you could take a few down on your way out. Whatever killed your buddies deserves a couple pellets in the forehead. Securing your helmet, you exit the landing pod. Hopefully you can find more substantial firepower somewhere within the station. As you walk through the main entrance of the base, you hear animal-like growls echoing throughout the distant corridors. They know you're here. There's no turning back now.
Yes, he's a highly trained badass, but he's just a Marine. He ends up killing all of the monsters if you finish the game, but the setup and the aesthetic and lore of the entire game makes it seem like an insurmountable challenge ahead of you, just a guy, fighting through hell and later on repelling the hordes of hell from earth.
The art team did a great job replicating doom, the composer did a great job of renewing classic Doom music and merging it with modern takes on the Doom aesthetic, although it is ridiculous that the music is intended to overpower the other sounds in the game.
The gameplay is where they really screwed up IMO. Its a great game but its not authentic old school Doom gameplay. You could modernize it properly, I'm just saying that in my opinion they haven't for the reasons I explained elsewhere. They instead created a new thing that uses the Doom franchise and it just happens to be fantastic. As great as it is though I would rather have had a well executed modern take that also feels authentic.
Doom came out right when I left univeristy. Loved that game. I like the new Dooms too. I think they're fun. Way more "doom like" than anything else I've played since.
The "New Doom" music/sound producer gave a pretty good GDC one hour talk about the music came about. Some fun stories there ( the sound easter egg story was fun). Its more than about just the sound, its about process and change.
He's definitely talented and I did watch his talk a while back. It was a pretty good talk and pretty enlightening. I didn't realize how much effort some musicians put into setting up like 40 different pieces of equipment to achieve a single effect for a small part of a song.
The Doom soundtrack to me constitutes excellent video game music. I didn't enjoy it enough to listen to the OST like many folks did. I'm a metal head but it didn't quite do it for me like Mr. Bungle/Meshuggah does. I do listen to the parts of the Dusk soundtrack once in a while though.
They just re-recorded their first album which was a pretty straightforward but still weird trash album from 85 that's arguably as good as anything else from the era. It was recorded by a kid on a 4 track though so the quality of the original was too bad to really understand how good it was.
Dave Lombardo (Slayer Drummer) and Scott Ian (Anthrax Guitarist) joined three of the original members for the re-recording. Scott Ian was a fan of it back in the day and thinks it was more musically complex than what they and most of the other big metal bands were doing at the time. And it was written by 15-17 year olds inspired by Slayer's Reign in Blood.
But yes Bungle did a later album that was crazy circus metal and eventually they did a really great album of music that was less heavy (not metal at all) and more accessible called California.
I love all of it. Search for the 2020 version of Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny for their new stuff. Easily the best album released this year IMO. RTJ4 was also pretty good though.
Bungle wasn't really an offshoot of FNM, it was the lead singer Mike Patton's first band. FNM is also criminally under-rated. Their only really famous song "Epic" isn't really representative of the rest of their work. IMO the follow-up album Angel Dust is the best album of all time. They experiment with lots of genres and its still weird stuff though so its not gonna be everyone's cup of tea.
> However, instead of making a game that captures the essence of Doom its more like a Michael Bay version of Doom. Instead of desperately fighting never ending hordes of increasingly horrifying creatures from hell so you can get out in one piece and save the world, you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons for lulz.
Doom was structured in such a way that when you started off playing it was practically survival horror, but when you "got gud" you were practically the unkillable demigod. That's what I loved about it: it was so open-ended. It could be that way because its engine was so limited. There were only so many possible level layouts, and only a few different parameters that determined how enemies behaved. Using those, you could construct a combinatoric explosion of battle scenarios that ran the gamut from balls-out arena battle to hunting down enemies in dark narrow corridors and everything in between. Furthermore, the level data was small enough that the entire level, and all objects spawned within it, could live in memory at once. This made each level feel like a living world. Enemies from a faraway part of the level you haven't reached yet can spot you and start chasing and attacking.
In Doom 3, Doom (2016), and Doom Eternal, the engine is so unlimited that the designers had to basically pick a playstyle in order to narrow down the solution space, just to get started. Doom 3 opted for a survival horror style while the latter two games opted for a Serious Sam/Painkiller style combat game: move to area, sweep all enemies, move to next area, repeat. They feel more fun and more like Doom than Doom 3 did, but there's still something missing. Not that I blame them for adopting a few modern shooter conventions. Had they made it a total "boomer shooter" I doubt it would have sold as well.
I agree that the action was slower, however, Halo's real trick was designing a set of weapons that were fun to use, but were mostly horribly inaccurate. The sniper was the clear exception.
I did a controller VS mouse/keyboard competition with Halo 1 on PC vs the best console Halo player in my Battalion when we were deployed to Kuwait. We would both use the same weapons at the same time for most of the games to make it fair and objective since we were doing it out of curiosity. We were mostly even with the majority of the weapons. With the shotgun the console player had a clear advantage although I don't know why because I would have assumed a mouse would still be faster (maybe it was just me). When we were using sniper rifles, however, with my mouse and keyboard vs a controller it was like playing against someone that had never played Halo before. The mouse was just too quick and accurate and at that point Halo hadn't developed a really egregious form of aim assist yet. The funny thing about this last observation was that I was the one that had barely ever played Halo.
Note: I don't look down on people that prefer gaming on a console and I have enjoyed my Switch/PS4 immensely. For some genres an analog controller is objectively superior without purposefully implementing a software advantage to balance things out like many games choose to do with aim assist. I do tend to agree with Shroud's opinion that when it comes to competitive play at a certain level of MM rank they should just have separate queues for each controller type. Ultimately its a tradeoff though because if queues for a game like COD:Warzone were forcibly separated the game's community on PC would have died completely after a month or two like previous games did.
It does, and some of the later Halos had more accurate weapons (I recall a 3 or 4 shot burst rifle being the new starting weapon?).
The pistol actually seemed popular among players with better accuracy than myself, specifically because it was one of the few weapons accurate enough to reliably land headshots.
I tried some of the later Halo games, and it felt very non-Halo, and I think this pins it down. In the original Halo, it was relatively difficult to die instantly. Grenades, sniper rifles, the bazooka, and the hand sword were the only weapons that could do it, and each of them had substantial tradeoffs (grenades were limited, the bazooka traveled rather slowly and only killed on direct hits or very close hits, etc). Now there are tons of weapons that can kill in one hit. I think the starting rifle can't one shot, but two bursts to the head is death. And they've turned up the aim assist to the point where players are fairly good at getting headshots.
It misses all those "if I hide behind this rock and let my shields regen, I might survive" moments. There's no tension to the game as you struggle to survive; in a flash you're either the conqueror or the conquered. There's no cat and mouse as you chase someone through their base, hoping they don't hide behind a corner and stick you with a plasma grenade.
Maybe the tension is what I miss more than the slower speed of play. After all, fast playing games can still be fun (like Sonic) because they keep that tension that you could die at any second. That kind of tension that keeps you on the edge of your seat, so when you finally make it through you get the level you lean back and pat yourself on the shoulder. Modern AAA games seem to want to get directly to the dopamine hit, so they crushed the combat sequence into a very small number of actions so that you can do it over and over again faster. It just doesn't do as much for me.
No one drinks it because most people think even regular Dr. Pepper is gross, but Diet Dr. Pepper is nationally recognized as a household name in the US because of the extensive advertising that they do for it. "Diet Dr. Pepper tastes like regular Dr. Pepper." Hardly anyone drinks it, but pretty much everyone has heard of it.
Same as Mellow Yellow a couple decades ago. They advertised it extensively and when they used to give away free drinks under the cap it was always free Mellow Yellow. But relatively few people actually liked it. That didn't mean we hadn't heard of it.
