phaus (u/phaus) - Readit News

phaus commented on No One Wants Used Clothes Anymore (2018) bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/singhkays

> Do you have plans to address the criticisms you've had on Youtube and Reddit comments?

Isn't this just an advertising platform? Why would we address criticisms here?

phaus · 5 years ago

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.

phaus commented on This is Real, That's Not streetlifesolutions.blogs... · Posted by u/DoreenMichele

timeeater · 5 years ago

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.

phaus · 5 years ago

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.

phaus commented on This is Real, That's Not streetlifesolutions.blogs... · Posted by u/DoreenMichele

phaus · 5 years ago

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.

phaus commented on Ask HN: What is the best quote you ever heard? · Posted by u/ThomPete

random8675309 · 5 years ago

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!

phaus · 5 years ago

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.

phaus commented on Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms wsj.com/articles/reddit-c... · Posted by u/lxm

isatty · 5 years ago

I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage.

Normally I don’t express such strong sentiment on HN but I’ve been a Reddit user for 10 years and I genuinely like the communities, but not enough to suffer through the new website.

phaus · 5 years ago

>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.

phaus commented on Ask HN: What is the best quote you ever heard? · Posted by u/ThomPete

random8675309 · 5 years ago

Sounds a bit rapey.

phaus · 5 years ago

Sounds rapey only if you are ignoring the fact that people have a right to consent or not consent to sexual things that happen to them.

phaus commented on Bill Gates is wrong about education supermemo.guru/wiki/Bill_... · Posted by u/rajlego

em500 · 5 years ago

Sure, my daughter has access to more knowledge than I could have ever dreamt of in my youth. But left unsupervised, she'll spend probably 99.99% of her time on TikTok and Instagram and 0.01% on Wikipedia. Access is great and necessary, but far from sufficient.

edit: I don't know if I would have chosen differently, if all were available in my youth.

edit2: I think do know. I probably spent much more time on video games than on Encarta.

phaus · 5 years ago

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.

phaus commented on Catacomb Games: Play the series that pioneered the first-person shooter genre catacomb.games/... · Posted by u/polm23

j-kent · 5 years ago

I somehow completely missed these growing up in the 90s. Maybe they were eclipsed due to the success of Wolfenstein 3D. 12 year old me would have loved this. I still love the aesthetics.

phaus · 5 years ago

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.

phaus commented on Dusk is a 90s style shooter from the mind of a teenager (2016) killscreen.com/previously... · Posted by u/pmarin

acomjean · 5 years ago

I appreciated the sounds in that game, especially after getting better speakers.

Mr bungle... wasn’t that a 90s faith no more offshoot that was like crazy circus music? I’ll have to check them out again.

phaus · 5 years ago

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.

Sample of the Re-Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U5ZKKxqUzY

phaus commented on Dusk is a 90s style shooter from the mind of a teenager (2016) killscreen.com/previously... · Posted by u/pmarin

acomjean · 5 years ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY

phaus · 5 years ago

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.