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I really like Hadean Lands https://store.steampowered.com/app/376240/Hadean_Lands/ You are an alchemist whose spacecraft crashed at a nexus between worlds. You need to discover and…

Because Anna Karenina is already listed, I'll plug Scandal by Shusaku Endo. It is by a Japanese Catholic novelist and was written near the end of his career (lifetime achievement a…

If it requires a migration for its existing customers, it's fair to call it killed. And if there is no such pathway, it's also killed. We could argue about whether it was murder or…

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection has a Sudoku generator called Solo. On web, desktop, and mobile for free. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/solo...

Amazon warehouses are shelters for things. Either someone pays the fee and adopts the thing, or it goes to the farm upstate. There are lots of thing mills breeding special things t…

Definitely, although the quality of life goes way up with a computer doing admin. There was a weekly column at Rock Paper Shotgun that covered them (and adjacent stuff like simulat…

You mostly play the vanilla game of Minecraft without programming. The survival loop is to mine resources in order to craft better tools that allow you to explore, build, and defea…

Good on you. Certainly the player can just be one more player in the economy against/among the AI. This is basically the premise of Rise of Industry. And more actively, less realis…

I'm intrigued by the idea that users will be able to solve this problem on the client side. Perhaps not on the underlying data directly, but running an adversarial browser agent cl…

I interviewed people for Amazon as well before moving to another FAANG. All I would amplify here is that entry level is entry level, especially in software. None of the college hir…

I try not to hype up albums I love too much anymore. I think of Radiohead as our late stage Beatles. Experimental and exciting, even if there's a jagged edge now and then. In Rainb…

Factorio has a veneer of RTS but its challenge and interest comes from factory design and managing queues of supply and demand (if you want to think about it like that). It layers …

"But temperance also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for…

I would ask about how long people have worked on that team, how many have come on and left in the last year, and how many headcount they are getting in OP1. This will tell you a lo…

The example he gave was about consensus, and when you want to stop fighting. No one else can actually force you to stop fighting and move on to commit. You don't have to win or dra…

That's funny because B+G, C+G to me says G major: a major third, then a fourth. Is the ear guided to keys by inversion, some inversions more natural or root-y than others? I've bee…

Amazon engineer here. Before I worked here, I read Steve Yegge's posts on interviews at Amazon and Google. You cannot get information more straight from the horse's mouth. I also a…

I had a year like that, 2014. I had four specific goals: write an album of music, create a video game, write a novel, and continue my chronological reread of Stephen King. By the e…

I started in 2000. I have a basic competence and can accompany myself and compose pop songs, but I somewhat regret not having put in the time up front in lessons and deliberate pra…

I started counting calories on my mobile, to lose weight. I eat whatever I want but I record everything. Over time certain aspects of eating like frequent snacking and eating in ig…

Not for every reader but Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) is something between historical fiction and science fiction. Worth a try i…

Anna Karenina . It's probably my favorite book, and this is probably read #7 or so. It's a very observant novel about love and marriage and adultery and divorce in most every permu…

This and parent form a pretty backhanded compliment to 15 minute songwriting! Depending on your feelings about the songs, of course. Diamonds makes me cringe.

https://www.eff.org/issues/international Asked and answered. They are for everyone.

Amazon is a service oriented organization. In the technical teams at least, there is a strong pressure to evolve to fit your niche, and grow independently behind the safety of a we…