It saddens me to see that the HN crowd had been diluted to such an extent in terms of engineering quality that straight up luddism has become the norm, often accompanied with silly ad hominems.
If you don't publish it in the right venue nobody will read it, which means nobody will cite it, which means you did the work for nothing. At least in all fields where I know people.
Well I am still making games and some from scratch :)
See www.FinalPilot.com it is something I did for another company who had a vision and I and my team have a had a great deal of fun creating it. Still a work in progress with a major update coming out shortly.
In terms of adventure type games I am really fond of www.EscapeTheGloomer.com it tells a parallel story to book 2 of the Redwall series Mossflower. I did a lot of new things in this game. One of which is that the player is actually writing their own story as they play. The game reads as a novel as the player explores, discovers and creates.
And lastly I am currently working on www.AdventurelandXL.com which stands for Roman numeral 40 for the 40th anniversary of Adventureland and also for Extra Large.
It includes the entire base game along with an entire new section with saluates to some of the cultural myths and fantasys that I did not get to include in Advenutreland originally. It also includes what is now one of my favorite puzzle sequences (deals with the chimp in the jungle).
It is currently in early access on Steam for Windows, everyone playing it is helping make the game better for eventual final release. It is like ET and phones home after each play sesssion with the player's trace file.
The entire game is in there except for the very final scene.
I love to hear get email from folks playing it too with their impressions.
If you read his books, it’s obvious he’s doing that on purpose in order to get more attention (which eventually is converted to fatter bottom line for him).
Eh... He's always had... peculiar ideas. It's just that previously his detachment from reality was mostly in relatively harmless directions ("The Secret" type stuff, lack of belief in gravity, etc). I would buy that his current delusions might be genuine.
Are you implying that makes it better? Because I couldn't disagree more. It's one thing if someone just holds different political opinions, it's another to see problems in the world, acknowledge their cause, and fan the flames anyway. Things like posting that Republicans are likely to be hunted [1] if Biden wins are the sort of thing that led to a literal coup attempt.
The general rule is you can go down to half your age plus seven years.
Where'd you dig that out of, a back issue of Cosmopolitan, right next to the "partner compatibility" quiz? Two grown, consenting adults don't need your approval to hook up, no matter the age difference. Calling it "creepy" is simply arrogant and self-righteous, with a sprinkling of tone-deaf on top.
There's plenty to not like about the other Scott Adams. His choice of partner is not one of them.
Could you please not perpetuate flamewars on HN so we don't have to rate-limit you again? This one was particularly tedious and regrettable, and the swipe in the comment I'm replying to here was particularly provocative.
> Results show that females preferred partners of their own age, regardless of their own age and regardless of the level of relationship involvement. In contrast, males, regardless of their own age, desired mates for short-term mating and for sexual fantasies who were in their reproductive years. However, for long-term mates, males preferred mates who, although younger than them, were sometimes above the age of maximum fertility.
I'm not sure your study is validating that range. I feel like it's doing the opposite. I also remember statistics from dating websites where women always preferred someone their age, while men always preferred someone between 20-25, no matter their age.
It says that guys get off to the idea of young women, but for long term commitments want someone closer to their age as well, even if that person is outside of fertility. That backs up what I'm saying.
There's something odd about an abstract that says "...females preferred..." instead of "...the majority of females preferred...".
By that same standard, humans are heterosexual, monogamous, and date within their own skin color. And apparently, anyone who deviates from that is "creepy".
I don't think it validates what you're saying. You're saying it's creepy, while the study says it's natural if the goal is not a long term commitments. Or is your view that anything that's not a long term commitment is creepy?
B) If you read the study and not just the abstract, it puts the general lowest age for 60yo men at around 45 for purely sexual fantasy partners. A 25yo is wayyyyy outside that bounds.
> it puts the general lowest age for 60yo men at around 45 for purely sexual fantasy partners
I find it really really high and hard to believe. I'm not sure about the methodology employed, but if people can just lie, I wouldn't trust the results of that study.
That's what I'm struggling to understand. Who is being creepy? Who has behaved in a creepy way? Adams or his wife? What does creepy even mean in the context of two adults forming a relationship? Why is it anyone else's business?
(To be clear, I'm no fan of Adams. I dislike his politics and never enjoyed his work particularly. But I find this focus on his marriage weird and, I suppose, creepy in itself).
He’s an extremely wealthy divorcé in his mid 60s. She’s a 33 year old model… which is well past the top end of that career, with two children, who is now the VP of Adams’ WhenHub. I think it’s clear everyone in that relationship knows what they are doing. Doesn’t make it any less the fact that he’s old enough to be her father.
Is this a American cultural quirk I'm not understanding? Who cares that he's old enough to be her father? Why is it interesting or relevant? He married an attractive younger woman. She married a rich older man. It happens every day all over the world. Its not the first marriage for either of them and they both already have children. It says very little about either person involved except that one likes attractive women and the other likes rich men with a sense of humor (if we assume the most cynical motivations).
> Is this a American cultural quirk I'm not understanding?
As an American I would say: yes, it is.
I suspect it has something to do with the rising neoteny of more recent generations coupled with America's persistent puritanical views on sex, but there has been an increasingly bizarre fixation on the age gap of couples. All teenagers have recently be re-defined as children, so much that it's common on places like reddit to view even attraction to say a 17 year old viewed as a form of pedophilia.
For nearly all of human history men over 30 forming relationships with women in their late teens has been normal. This was even not too rare 30 or so years ago in the US. But there has been a rising moral panic about age and sex that leads to comments like the above.
It doesn’t trouble me personally, I stated the facts of the matter and that my interpretation of it is that everyone is getting what they want. Others here have stated it weirds them out and that’s fine too. It’s well known in our society that this kind of age gap can be problematic for some. We have little “rules” about it (https://xkcd.com/314/), which are just societal norms. Scott Adam falls out of this norm and it makes people uncomfortable, as norm-breaking tends to do. One question people might ask is, why don’t you date someone your own age? There are a lot of reasons one could answer, but when one says something like “I don’t talk about where we met. People make judgments”, and they are already breaking norms, then I think it’s fine some people have reservations. Not that those reservations mean anything to anyone, but it’s not an unreasonable feeling to have when confronted with such an unconventional relationship.
Good, I hope this is just the start of a crackdown on the whole offensive cybersecurity industry of Israel, which is an extension arm of the intelligence departments of the IDF.
I don’t understand the cult of personality around Aaron. It’s like a self insert for people that fantasize about sticking it to the man or something; the tragic hero, the genius boy who died not realizing his potential, the man who dared to defy the authorities. Yawn.
Fact is Aaron was an angsty teen with an axe to grind with the authorities . Reading Chomsky certainly didn’t help. Acting out childishly by spreading copy righted material, getting caught and whining about how all of this is so unfair…
Look, he was no genius. Genius does not invent reddit; it invents facebook and then proceeds to take over the world because actual, real, genius understands the rules of the game.
Aaron was smart enough to understand just how fucked things are but oh so very dumb to act out on his aggressive impulses. The very same impulses that later lead him to kill himself.
Ironically his suicide accomplished far more than his technical know how could ever hope to achieve.
p.s. aaron was no hero. You dont ever want to be him and you certainly dont want your children to be him. His ideals were pure and correct, but he could not accept we’re living in a world filled with trash humans. Should’ve played the game correctly imho.
Cult of personality? Are we living on the same planet? As far as I know people talk about him a couple of time a year. No statue, no memorial.
Yeah people erase his flaws a bit, yes it's a bit annoying, but he actually tried to do something positive in his life instead of trying to get rich at any costs like that "genius" of Zuckerberg (genius for what?).
So people remember him, I doubt most people will care when Zuckerberg will die, he just didn't do anything to deserve it, your money doesn't make you a good person.
Zuckerberg will be remembered in the annals of history. Swartz won't even be in a footnote.
One of the things about having ridiculous amounts of wealth is that it affords you to make a ridiculous number of bets. You only have to hit on a few to be remembered as a genius.
Not sure whether this is your intention, but your comment comes across as lacking some empathy. Had he been convicted, he would face 1 Million USD in fines as well as 35 years in prison. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be under such pressure. Please do not make light of the complex motives that drive people to suicide.
My recollection/understanding is that the authorities/court system locked up his bank account, he was legally not allowed to say that while trying to crowd source funds to help pay his attorney and cope in the midst of the case so people jumped to the wrong conclusion and lambasted him rather than support him and his suicide followed shortly on the heels of that (like within a day or two, iirc).
He was painted into a corner with seemingly no way out.
People who are suicidal frequently have intractable problems and are frequently treated like they are merely crazy. The best way to help people who are suicidal is to not be dismissive of their very real problems and, of possible, actually be helpful. But as a baseline, don't act like it's all in their head. That actively makes it harder to solve intractable personal problems.
> Had he been convicted, he would face 1 Million USD in fines as well as 35 years in prison.
That's a common misconception, largely due to the ridiculous way the DoJ writes its press releases.
Each Federal crime carries a range of possible prison time. What you actually get depends on a large number of factors, such as how much damage you caused, whether or not your crime was a drug crime, past criminal history, and many others.
When the DoJ writes press releases they just add up for each charge the maximum that it is theoretically possible for someone to get from the crime if they hit all the factors that push for longer sentences and none of the factors that push for shorter sentences.
So when they arrest you for crime X and write their press release, they don't actually tell what you, the first time offender who committed a mild instance of the crime with no aggravating factors and several mitigating factors is facing. No. They tell what the Voldemort or Moriarty or Hitler of whatever activity you were doing would face for crime X.
It is even worse, because they actually even exaggerate what Voldemort or Moriarty or Hitler would actually face, too! If a person is charged with multiple crimes from the same underlying act, say crimes X, Y, and Z, and is convicted of all of them the crimes are grouped together into one for sentencing, with the sentence for the group being the sentence you would have received for whichever for X, Y, or Z you would have gotten the longest sentence for if that was the only one you were convicted on.
Here's a good article on this in general: "Crime: Whale Sushi. Sentence: ELEVENTY MILLION YEARS." [1]
Here's a couple articles specifically on the Swartz charging.
This one covers the charges themselves: "The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 1: The Law)" [2]
This one covers the prosecution, including a look at probably sentencing: "The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 2: Prosecutorial Discretion)" [3]
We get that the justice system threatens people larger penalties to see what charges they can get to stick, but they also use it to force a plea bargain. In Aaron's case, the prosecutors were adamant that Aaron should get at least 6 months of prison, and would not offer any plea bargain that did not include this half a year of jail time (Ortiz wanted to make an example out of him). The fact that the prosecution was seeking jail time at all is utterly insane. This is why Aaron chose to fight.
Aaron didn’t choose to fight. He chose to kill himself. Which turned him into an unreasonably glorified martyr whose case people still talk about to (and on) this day.
You couldn't be more wrong. The plea bargain was offered early in the case, Aaron thought he could fight it, but the case went on too long, and he ran out of money to fight it. Only after he had absolutely nothing left for the fight did he take his own life.
I'd be curious to know why he deserves to be attacked for his technical know-how. Also I am curious to know why you think committing a crime out of conviction is inherently immoral. If we equate laws with morals we will never improve our ethical understanding of the world.
It is exactly the people willing to commit crime with the goal of improving our moral compass that should be celebrated as heroes.
If we would all "play ball" then we would be stuck without voting rights in a feudal system of kings and peasants.
Finally, if genius invents Facebook let's pray we ran out of geniuses.
The fact that you don't agree with a person's cause does not preclude them from being heroic. Pablo Escobar was a drug kingpin, but Che Guevera at least thought he was fighting for his people.
I don't like how people downvoted this comment without even saying why.
The wording may be harsh (not what I think, just attempting to guess) but I believe there is truth in it; although the idea of allowing free access to academic journals is laudable, the way he went about it was naive/wrong in my opinion and impulsive as you say.
Because it's disrespectful, and dismissive of the effort Aaron made to make our world a better place. It's also overly pessimistic, sure there's trash people on the planet and they're often in positions of power. But they are not a majority and it is possible to genuinely affect change through activism and drawing attention to causes, no how matter how childish or petty the activism might seem.
Finally and most importantly on this site specifically it should be down voted because it is flagrantly anti intellectual to resign to the status quo and to tell people to not be disruptive and to basically "play the game" and go work for Facebook or whatever.
What's a person who has those views even doing on this site? Just go outside and play golf with the governor of Missouri or whatever.
I don't know which way the OP intended the "play the game" sentence, but I didn't take it to mean go work for Facebook or whatever; instead I took it as don't be naive in thinking you can fight against injustices in the system like so, because it will land you in prison (or worse); instead maybe find alternative ways that let you accomplish the same end goal, even if you have to accept progress cannot be achieved as quickly as the direct unsafe approach.
Do you have better suggestions how to allow such access? As far as I know, Sci-Hub is the current leader in this field, with methods not that different from Aaron's. The official methods to achieve this proceed at snail's pace and one doubts if they would move anywhere without the pressure caused by the activism.
No I don't have any suggestions myself but as you point out there are already other alternatives, and I believe none are as blatantly obvious as when Aaron downloaded hundreds of documents per minute:
SciHub itself may be similar but there are some important differences, e.g., the creator is not a citizen or resident of the US where this would be prosecuted (I think she lives in Russia, which only "recently" ruled to block the site, but I'm unsure she'd face any criminal charges) and the way they source the paywalled articles/journals is less easy for the authorities to circumvent.
In addition, (some) universities and other institutions are slowly moving towards open access journals and other measures; not at an ideal pace, I agree, but certainly done on a better foundation to ensure publishers don't just bury people with lawsuits and so on.
I agree with you that the SciHub's difference to Aaron is the different legal environment. But I think this is not a good explanation why SciHub might be morally better. Indeed protesting unjust laws could be considered moral good, whereas operating from Russia is merely a legal hack, if useful one.
The open access movement is precisely what I meant with the snail pace activity. I'm doubtful it would happen in even present degree without the activism.
Agree completely. By all accounts he was a bright guy, bu he did something very foolish. He did a crime and rather than play ball he martyred himself. Yes there probably was prosecutorial overreach and yes our criminal justice system could use reform. But this guy was no saint in the matter and could have easily got off with a minor sentence.
So you think Rosa Parks was also a criminal for having the foolishness to refuse to give up her seat for a white?
Breaking immoral laws is a sign of being a hero, not a criminal. Unfortunately the monied interests were more powerful than a brilliant kid, so we have to live in a world without Aaron Swartz but with rich idiots in charge of scientific publishing.
You know who’s to blame for scientific publishing? Fucking academia. The web was built to allow research papers to be shared. Seriously - it’s fucking purpose built for that very task.
There are no resources involved in scientific publishing besides the time of the authors and reviewers, none of whom are employed by the publishers.
So why do we have any academic publishers at all, over 30 years after the web was invented? Surely we could have solved the problems with organizing peer review, etc by now. The answer is: academia wants it to be this way. Researchers want to publish in prestige journals. The cred from prestige journals is integral to the academic career path in enough disciplines that the system is allowed to self perpetuate.
The cred isn’t to stroke a researcher’s ego, it’s because the alternative is to not get to do any research. Or to not have access to research institutes. Or to not eat. Privileged researchers in areas that aren’t as affected by this problem (eg. compsci) can afford to publish on Arxiv, but others aren’t so fortunate.
Publish(-in-prestiguous-journals)-or-perish is real, and the for-profit journal system is a parasite profiting from it. Ultimately the fundamental cause of this is the application of capitalist and for-profit systems to scientific research - but good luck speaking out against that.
What is the alternative to prestigious journals? Each scientist should read all of the papers published in their field every day?
The work of curating a journal for various metrics (subject matter, standards of peer review, impact etc.) is crucial to the everyday working of science. This doesn't mean that a few for profit corporations should get to extract profit from it, but it also doesn't mean that academia should give up the whole idea and just read all of scihub or arxiv to make up their own minds.
> Ultimately the fundamental cause of this is the application of capitalist and for-profit systems to scientific research
This is an unsupported declarative statement, and I view the evidence as pointing in the opposite direction. For-profit publishers are filling a “need” that is entirely due to the culture and economics of academia.
A good portion of the economics has nothing whatsoever to do with private enterprise, and instead involves academic career paths and grant applications, often to non-profit or government grantors.
Imagine that all of academia elects, tomorrow, to jettison for-profit publishers and self-organize around open access. Would that change the fundamental economics in a meaningful way? The money to pay researchers is not coming from publishers.
> For-profit publishers are filling a “need” that is entirely due to the culture and economics of academia.
They are filling a need they created and maintain themselves. Publishers with extremely deep pockets bought out prestigious non-profit journals [1], turning an inelastic market (originating from the value of peer-reviewed journals in a pre-Internet era) into an oligopoly that continued to raise prices as much as possible. No extra need was filled by the takeover, no value was provided, only more profit was extracted because it was economically possible. Now, this profit is used to fund the continued existence of this need, by lobbying against any effort to remove this need. It makes perfect sense economically, but is plainly detrimental to society and is at a stage that makes any gradual change very difficult.
> Imagine that all of academia elects, tomorrow, to jettison for-profit publishers and self-organize around open access.
This sort of thought experiment is meaningless as any kind of proof because it doesn't consider the complexity of the human element. Academic researchers aren't perfectly rational units independent from any other system, like the simple fact of having to pay rent to live and that rent being available from this month's paycheck, and that paycheck being dependent on continued employment whose loss would likely take months to resolve. You're only demonstrating that if we lived in some abstract, perfect world, some problems would solve themselves. But in that same abstract, perfect world that problem likely wouldn't even manifest in the first place. So what are you really proving?
Rosa Parks committed a crime. Yes, the law was immoral and wrong, but it was a law. Rosa Parks is considered a hero because she stood up against an unjust law KNOWING that she was going to be prosecuted for her actions.
Aaron Swartz committed a crime. Yes, the law was immoral and wrong, but it was a law. Swartz believed that his internet status and his MIT association would shield him from the consequences of his action, and he killed himself when he realized he was going to be treated like a nobody and subjected to the same sorts of prosecutorial pressure that affects thousands of Americans every day.
He was no hero, and it's frankly ridiculous and demeaning to the memory of Rosa Parks and what she went through to use her life story to prop him up. The US Civil Rights movement is one where people took actions that they KNEW were illegal partly because they knew how bad the optics would be. Famous Civl Rights leaders used the after-release press conferences as pulpits to preach their sermons of racial equality.
You’re seriously comparing Aaron Swartz to Rosa Parks?
Mental illness needs to be destigmatized, and access to treatment is imperative. Aaron’s death was a tragedy, and the government was engaged in serious prosecutorial overreach.
But, Rosa Parks? Seriously now? Aaron was engaged in a puerile “hack” that spun out of control when the school and feds got involved.
The hagiography around this poor guy is nauseating sometimes.
Rosa Parks was involved with stubbornly giving up her seat in the front of the colored section for a white woman, which "spun out of control when the feds got involved" but like Swartz she pushed her way through the Justice system to challenge unfair laws. Segregation was obviously more disgusting, but I don't like the idea that activists of the past are incomparable saintlike figures, especially when they were extremely contentious for their time. I'm sure plenty of people said that Parks was being "puerile" at the time and should have just given up her seat instead of making it an issue, but sometimes making something an issue is the only way to create an opportunity for progress.
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