Somehow at any given moment every possible topic to discuss on HN belongs to either the set of "it's amazing and nobody can say anything bad about it" or the set of "this thing sucks and nobody is allowed to say anything positive about it" and I never have ANY idea which one any given topic will be in on any given day.
This is probably gonna get lost in the noise but hear me out: two completely off the shelf USB drives crammed in one USB stick, and a magnetic reed switch. You put a little magnet on it to electrically switch it to the hidden one. Now they have to take apart the USB stick or x ray it, can't detect in software ;)
That's actually really interesting. An alternate history where various empires had remote self contained colonies that developed all their own technology and resources and fought each other. It's not super different from what the spanish colonies tried to do in America, for long periods shipments from the spanish empire largely stopped coming vs the British colonies got a lot of outside investment and supplies.
There is just so much going on so fast, plus your emotional investment in your team winning, that it almost never happens in real games that someone defects to the other team due to military pressure from the enemy, but you're right, they did design AOE2 so that you can easily do that. I think the article is way too hard on a game that really tried to be a decent simulation with 90s hardware.
It's a good point, you can do that, but it doesn't contradict what I said. You start the game with about 3 villagers (give or take a couple depending on the civ chosen), one scout, and a town center. So clearly you don't start as an empire, a shack with no military has not ever been an empire. So the game is about becoming an empire. And I already said that once you become powerful enough to be considered an empire, the game does not transition into that player being able to behave like an empire, you just keep mowing down your enemies. So you can say the game doesn't represent empires well, but you can't say it tried and failed at it, because the game is primarily about before becoming an empire. Most games end in the castle age, and some end in the feudal age with just a few archers. This is even more clear when you look at competitive aoe because the games almost always end way before anyone becomes powerful enough to begin looking anything like an empire. The spirit of the game is really about pre-empire. But you're right the game has a bunch of mechanics that simulate empire especially later in the game with trade carts and trade ships so yeah, the later in the game you play the more valid the point is that the game poorly captures empires, but the heart of the game is about becoming one not being one.
It's not a great argument because the game takes place pre-empire, and the end of the game is intended to be when one player, the winner, is now an empire. This is evidenced by the final age in the game being called the Imperial Age. Most empires in history fought their neighbors in more or less the same manner as exhibited in the game before they became big and strong enough to be an actual empire.
I guess you could make an argument that the game doesn't transition into the most powerful player beginning to behave like an empire in the imperial age as you keep steamrolling your opponents until the end of the game, but it's a weaker argument and it's not clear why you would want to change the entire game's mechanics right before the game ends.
It's actually really easy to explain being a male nurse, you say you were a premed in undergrad who then decided you didn't want to go thru med school and residency.
I've seen that be the default choice at many places I've been to, and when that happened most of the time they did not mention any other option, but I've never been denied the appointment when I told them I wanted to pay later when I got the bill. An easy way to explain it is to say "I think I already met my max out of pocket for the year, I will pay whatever it ends up being when I get the bill" and I've never been asked any questions when I tell them that.
> The one exception is Jim who everybody just casually dismisses, yet he's the one truly good hearted and upstanding character in the entire book
Sure but you have to read the book first to know that, whereas the reader gets slapped in the face right away with the racial slur while reading the book for the first time, which is why some schools don't read Twain. This thread is about why people might not pick him to be the "America's Homer", I'm not trying to say anything more than that.
> I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in
Edit: Lots of hate here. The question was why people didn't suggest Twain to be "America's Homer", and I answered the question: Twain is controversial, at least for some schools, and for someone such as CK, which should tell you something. Let's try not to shoot the messenger. If you didn't balk when you reached this line the first time you read the book, there might actually be something wrong with you.
"He [Mark Twain] also said 'There once was a man named [N-word] Jim,' so not everything he said was perfectly amazing" - Louis CK
The Mac back then was a cool alternate parallel universe to the PC world. People gave away Macs for free because they thought they had the wrong kind of computer. They didn't know how much you could do with them beyond printing. Some thought Apple was going out of business.
Strong disagree, but I agree the vast majority of saving PDFs and other notes is a waste. The catch, and why I don't agree at all, is that I* don't know what I'm going to end up needing*, I actually to back to my pile of notes and PDFs constantly, and I probably end up using a tiny percentage of it, but what I do use is invaluable to me.
I was complaining that it's obviously incorrect that nobody knows what used GPUs are worth, not about latchkey.
I have NO idea why anyone is upvoting a post titled "nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth", that is a WILD claim.