Gamer's arguments have always been that shooters are artificial environments with no personality involved.
In Counterstrike you're fighting against stereotypical terrorists that are in no way related to your personal life.
Here, you "kill" real people with a face. Objective? Motivation?
Kill him before he kills me?
I'm deeply concerned about this and find it disgusting.
My view is that it's largely about realism. Even in today's first-person shooters with fancy HD graphics, you're usually aiming at a person who pops in and out of a single cover location, conveniently waiting for you to shoot him. Even if you've killed all his buddies, he won't run away or do anything different, but just keep yelling generic insults at you. If you shoot him, but not enough times to kill him, he will start shooting you again after a few seconds, seemingly no worse off for the injury (just like your own character). If you kill him, he will make a generic yell and fall over, but never die any more gruesome way. His corpse may have some blood around it but won't look remotely realistic. Originally this was basically mandated by technical requirements, but today it would certainly be possible to go further; I suspect most games don't do so precisely because players would feel weird being more realistic killers.
That's for FPS. In this game, even though the opponent has a face on their profile, the shooting consists of hitting a button and seeing a health bar go down. It's so abstracted from any reality that it's not even close to a problem.
I'm deeply concerned about this and find it disgusting.
As others have pointed out, if this inspires violence in someone, they already had serious mental issues. The larger issue for this game is that it simply doesn't look very fun. I think the idea of involving one's environment in mobile games is good, but this particular implementation doesn't seem very compelling.
What? Why? I think most of us assume people who go on mass shooting sprees have some kind of mental instability.
I see your background is mental health. Instead of just throwing out these cryptic "holier than thou" one-liners, you would do your cause (whatever it is) a lot more justice if you would actually explain your point of view rather than just trying to look like some kind of sage.
People incorrectly link mental illness to violence. Most violence, even spree killings, is not committed by someone with a mental illness. Mental illness is not a predictor of violence. (A previous episode of violence is; a drug or alcohol addiction is, but a mental illness, even a severe and enduring mental illness is not) People with a mental illness are very much more likely to be the victims, not perpetrators, of violence.
By linking mental illness to violence you stigmatize people with a mental health problem. This stigma makes people less able to seek help from professionals or friends or even family. People become irrationally scared of those with a mental illness and don't know how to offer help. Employers are less likely to offer employment to those with mental illness.
> I think most of us assume people who go on mass shooting sprees have some kind of mental instability.
But that's just ignorance caused by people who continue to lazily assume and then state that anyone who is violent is also mad - even if there's nothing to support that.
This is possibly an example of the conjunction fallacy. We see violence and cannot explain it, and so when we think "is this person violent, or violent and has a mental illness?" we end up at "violent and with a mental illness" even though it's less likely than "just violent".
Linking mental illness to violent crime is as lazy and ignorant as Fox news linking violent crime to African Americans, with the same mangling of statistics and undue focus on very rare events and lack of focus on common events.
Tucson: "Loughner had been arrested (but not convicted) once on a minor drug charge[11]" - drug addiction combined with mental illness is the predictor here. The mental illness alone was not predictive.
> Acquaintances said that Loughner's personality had changed markedly in the years prior to the shooting, a period when he was also abusing alcohol and drugs.
Again: drug or alcohol addiction are reasonable predictors of violent behaviour. Mental illness alone is not a reasonable predictor of violence.
Mental illness is common. It would be unusual for there to be no mass murders with a mental illness. All you're doing is lazily ignoring all the very many murders committed by people who do not have a mental illnes o focus on a tiny minority committed by people who do have a mental illness; and then you're ignoring the actual predictors of violent behaviour which are previous violence or drug / alcohol addiction.
That difference doesn't exist when you talk to people about their perceptions of mental illness and violent behaviour. They think that people with a mental illness are likely to be violent, even though that's very unlikely. They think that a violent event will have been perpetrated by a person with a mental illness even though again it's not likely.
That's their problem then, not the problem of the parent author. If you think video games are real life and shoot someone because Call of Duty made you do it, you have a mental illness. No where did anyone here make the claim that everyone with a mental illness would do that though.
I drink tea because I have a cold. Not everyone who has a cold drinks tea, though. I'm guessing that mental illnesses might be a sensitive subject for you for some reason, but being overly politically correct isn't the answer to solving the social stigma. You can't deny that people who have trouble separating fiction from reality have a mental illness.
Spree killings in the US over the past 30 years have killed about 550 people. Regular gun murder has killed 15,000 people per year.
If we assume that every single spree killing was committed by someone with a mental illness (and that assumption is wrong) we still only have 550 murders by mad people and 450,000 murders by sane people.
But when you look at mass murders you rarely find people with a psychotic illness operating under a psychosis. You find people who have some or no mental illness who also happen to be violent. That shouldn't be surprising - mental ill-health is very common.
> “A consequence if not a driving force of the pendulum swing away from benevolence and toward the protection of others has been increased attention to an individual’s dangerousness, with the operative presumption that dangerousness is often the result of a mental illness. But dangerousness is not always the result of mental illness. Individuals who commit violent or aggressive acts often do so for reasons unrelated to mental illness…. Research, in fact, confirms the error in associating dangerousness with mental illness, showing that ‘the vast majority of people who are violent do not suffer from mental illnesses. The absolute risk of violence among the mentally ill as a group is still very small and … only a small proportion of the violence in our society can be attributed to persons who are mentally ill.’ Violence is not a diagnosis nor is it a disease. Potential to do harm is not a symptom or a sign of mental illness, rather it must be the central consideration when assessing future dangerousness.”
> because only completely sane people go on shooting rampages
You don't understand why they go on a shooting rampage, and so they must be mad? That's the only explanation?
Reading the blog article I get the assumption that you plead for a maximal decentralisation of the consensus process.
This assumption may however be wrong looking at the requirements of a system like Bitcoin. In my _opinion_ those are:
- A optimal scalable and fast system
- A optimal decentralized system
The thing is these requirements influence each other, which means that we shouldn't aim for maximizing one or the other, but both at the same time, keeping them balanced.
I don't think maximum decentralization is what the author is pleading for. To the contrary in a different article he does in depth about how his alternative consensus protocol specifically limits the number of distinct block validators because of the marginal utility of each additional validator vs the linear increase in cost, and the consequences this has on speed and scalability:
If anyone wants a fun side project, figure out how to automatically detect the year of a news article. We have a great corpus of data to test with. Sometimes I think HN should sponsor some community effort around this sort of thing...
If your workplace was just 10-15 minutes away, straight down the road I just don't understand why you didn't took the countless public transport opportunities.
Paris has IMHO one of the most affordable and pleasant metros I've ever used in Europe. I'd almost like to guarantee you that you would have reached your goal faster, cheaper and more relaxed if you'd taken the metro!
Not cheaper or more relaxed! Between my hotel and Porte de Versailles (the convention center) was literally one straight road, with a one-way system.
Was 15-20 minutes to walk it (Google Maps says 18min), under 5 minutes to drive in one direction, 5-10min the other (due to one-way road).
Metro was easy sure, 300m to nearest station, then 2 stops on one line to Porte de Versailles - but that takes fractionally more time than a taxi, and is less pleasant than either a taxi or walking. I think 5 nights in that hotel and I probably walked it 60% taxi'd 40% - don't think I used the metro once.
Overall however I agree with your praise of the Paris metro. That said, I've been to Paris probably every other month for the past couple of years, and 50+ times in my life, and use 90% taxis... because they're easier, because the cost difference to me is non-existent (company credit card) and because most of my trips to Paris are cramming in meetings and therefore time between them relaxed in the back of a car with my laptop out catching up on emails is much needed.
It's not for everyone clearly.
When you actually spend more than a couple of weeks, you stop getting that need to discover and talk to people, and get to work super productively (one of the reason is: you can't wait to go back to enjoying the place). This solution works if you have a 100% online product, or if you opt to travel at the right stage for your startup (when you have had networked for now, when you're pivoting etc).
It's fast and responsive, collaborative and MOST-IMPORTANTLY it's easy to use!
Go to the url, boom doc got created for you, link is shareable.
Only thing I'd like to see now is some kind of document explorer and maybe a way to protect documents or make them mine because right now I could theoretically access any document: https://prcrsr.com/document/1
We’re definitely planning to make private and moderated documents. Ping me at [email protected] and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
For the document explorer, do you want to see the documents that you created or just interesting docs that anybody created? Either way, we just pushed up a way to export a doc as an image by appending .svg to the end of the url--I’m excited about using them as thumbnail previews in the explorer.
We set up a twitter account @prcrsr_app if you want to follow along with our progress.
> For the document explorer, do you want to see the documents that you created or just interesting docs that anybody created? Either way, we just pushed up a way to export a doc as an image by appending .svg to the end of the url--I’m excited about using them as thumbnail previews in the explorer.
Me personally, I'd like to see a list of my own recent modified documents and a way to name them. Like Google Drive for example.
I wouldn't integrate a way for looking at other documents before you're not able to "lock" documents so that others can't destroy them.
> - I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.
That one is a killer-feature right there I've managed to discover lately.
Twitter completely sucks, because if you are just a normal person doing normal things noone will ever care about you.
BUT, in case you're interested in some very specific topic and the contributing people then you should give twitter a try...
Actually this is one of the things that makes twitter so useful. With email the person can pretend that they didn't get your email ("it must have ended up in my junk mail folder"), while with twitter it is all public.
I've always wondered what pure software startups are doing with millions of dollars.
I mean come on you can develop awesome software without having a fancy office, nice furniture and a super high salary.
Take me and my friends for example. We love building stuff and work for all our products in university or at home.
Also we're doing it for, what, like 400$ a month working 20-30h...
At some point, you will complete school, your friends will go their separate ways and you will lose access to university resources. At that point, you will need a decent salary to pay for living expenses, support a family and all the other things you wish to do in life. If your startup consists of even a handful of people, competitive salaries/benefits start to add up and those "millions" won't seem as much any more.
From my experience as someone who has already implemented an complete iBeacon based iOS App that is used as an art gallery guide I don't believe that this indoor location tracking you're advertising is working when there is more than one person in the room.
As my academic advisor always said: Every human is an 80kg water bag thats disturbing the signal.
Did you test this with multiple persons in the room and if so, what was your result concerning accuracy.
You are right that people and their bodies might absorb Bluetooth radiowaves, but our solution does combine several different techniques to minimize that effect.
This is the first version of our SDK and we encourage developers in our community to test different setup with more beacons or beacons located a bit higher, so there is always a line-of-sight between phone and beacons.
We have a team of data engineers in data science and PhD's measuring all the signals we receive from the beacons and performing algorithms (e.g. trilateration, least squared etc) and combining this with positioning signals we can process based on positioning of the device. The trick is to account for different devices, different antenna placement on models etc. So over time we build a database that improves accuracy based on usage. Regarding people being present, we can account for that if we predict that signals are reflecting differently based on estimated density. These are super challenging problems so we have a team dedicated to it, and iterate quickly.
I love the development we're seeing in modern mobile web apps.
The web is definitely ready but still everybody around me seems to think that when you're the owner of a business then you should also provide your users with a special app on Android and iOS and a web site.
For example: A nightclub in a nearby provincial town as an iOS App for announcing new parties.
I think that you only should consider creating an app as a business if you're doing more than providing your customers with information.
Here, you "kill" real people with a face. Objective? Motivation? Kill him before he kills me?
I'm deeply concerned about this and find it disgusting.