msg
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 perform alchemical rituals to explore and try to escape.
It has some great quality of life features, such as allowing you to re-perform any ritual you have successfully completed in a single command, and allowing you to recall any significant information you have deduced.
On top of this, some great writing and a very strange atmosphere.
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 award timeframe).
It is about a Japanese Catholic novelist near the end of his career, who is accepting an award when he is accosted by reporters asking about rumors that he has been seen carousing in the red light district. He decides to investigate the rumors, but he isn't ready for what he's going to find.
It's a kind of meta, semi-autobiographical interrogation of the author and the pillars on which he built his life, that in some ways would be impossible to adapt to any other medium.
We could argue about whether it was murder or euthanasia, but dead is dead.
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/solo...
There are lots of thing mills breeding special things that wind up in the shelter. It's a cold and cruel business, but that's humans trying to make a buck for you.
If things don't get adopted, they don't always get killed though. Sometimes they get adopted for pennies on the dollar, and move elsewhere in the system.
There was a weekly column at Rock Paper Shotgun that covered them (and adjacent stuff like simulation), and lately the writer has taken up residence at a new URL.
You can get a lot of mileage out of it this way and never touch the programming side. It is an all time bestseller for good reason.
There is an in game material called redstone that is used for simple electrical engineering and circuitry. The devices can play music, push blocks around, open doors, fire arrows, run train cars, and other applications.
The programming starts with command blocks, which can use redstone triggers to execute keyword commands.
There are a bunch of mods that can add automation through programming. For instance, programming a mining robot to drill out a tunnel, using Lua.
Mod programming itself would often be in Java, and add new game entities or systems. This can get fairly advanced and there are some total conversion mods (eg some Pokemon clones).
There are other fun games that are more like programming, like those from Zachtronics. So why Minecraft? It's fun and familiar, and provides a massive canvas for creativity that fires the imagination.
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 realistically, Offworld Trading Company.
Running one business is sort of the premise of the tycoon genre.
Generally, trouble is fun (Losing is Fun), so you may want to put pressure on the player to make the thing work. Maybe it naturally runs to ruin or is fragile to balance properly. (In Dwarf Fortress, danger follows growth and success.) There could be adversaries. Or the world could be dangerous.
They could be in charge of the macro economy or a town or a business. There could be pickles that the player has to work their way out of. Recessions and Depressions. Think about how towns collapse, businesses fail, people lose jobs. Businesses also cheat, wreck the commons, avoid taxes, break the law, exert monopoly power, form cartels, fight for dominance. There is a lot of trouble here for the player to cause, or to struggle against.
1) not be an asshole; look at their leadership principles and figure out how you resonate with them; answer honestly if you never did that
2) beat the technical questions. they are a proxy for skills and experiences
I used and recommend Leetcode for #2... for entry level I don't think you should need the paid tier.
If there were a Leetcode for not being an asshole, I would recommend the paid tier.
I think of Radiohead as our late stage Beatles. Experimental and exciting, even if there's a jagged edge now and then.
In Rainbows was very accessible and holds up in my view.
OK Computer was more of a surprise. Listen to The Bends first, and you will hear what a break it was in quality and style. Their next release, Kid A, was the one that was hotly anticipated. It was also a huge departure, but when they were the biggest band in the world.
Kid A holds up too.
I think Radiohead lives up to the hype. One way to check on this is to watch them live (say, on YouTube) or pick up some of their concerts on etree (a free taper sharing site). They make headphone records, and then they replicate most of their sounds in real time.
Rimworld is all about character management and anecdote creation in my view. The challenge and interest is about managing randomness and character driven conflict in a game designed to produce conflict.
They play very differently in my experience.
-- The Tragedy of the Commons
I recommend the whole paper as a good think on the unintended consequences of not biasing the options of people away from collective irresponsibility.
This will tell you a lot about whether this team is growing and successful, stagnant, or on fire.
Getting paged a lot is a hallmark of teams you don't want to be on, but in the last couple of years, Amazon has instituted policies that make it easier to internally transfer (no strict time limit on how long you have to stay with a team).
Getting paged is sort of a proxy for the real thing you want to know: how many people are voting with their feet.
You don't have to win or draw out every argument, and you don't have to be convinced of everything. Sometimes you just put a pin in it and go.
I've been composing pop music for a long time without knowing stuff like this.
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 agree with the general point that you are better off doing interview prep than your general undergrad algorithms courses.
But the catch is that interview prep will lead you back to CS fundamentals anyway. This is a both/and, not an either/or.
The other thing I wanted to address is whether working at Amazon can be practical and cool.
My team is the full stack physical rentals team. When you press a Rent-Now button on Amazon.com, you enter my team's world. Today, we rent physical textbooks to millions of students every semester, and they all get returned at the same time.
We own custom checkout, order management, and return customer experiences. Underlying them is a service ecosystem we built and maintain. To handle the seasonal, spiky nature of our business (back to school, Christmas vacation returns), we use AWS to scale up and down during peaks.
Success breeds success, and we're working on category expansion. Twenty engineers in three teams run the software for this business. That is cool.
There is an incredibly broad spectrum of work going on at Amazon, from mammoth services to front end optimization and everything in between, including unfortunately some very unhappy firefighting operations. Undergirding it is heavy company investment in builder tools and infrastructure, and excellent engineers.
One person's cool is another person's depressing, but I would look at the job listing carefully before writing off a stint at any of the Titans of software.
By the end of the year, I had written 60 pages and read one of the Stephen King books.
In 2015 I doubled down on music, and recorded 10 songs.
That said, I do play every day, or mostly, for love of the game. Life's too short to work or play without love.
Somewhere in there I remembered swimming and got a tape and learned to swim laps.
There's a silver bullet for you, diet and exercise.
Also, it's hard to go wrong with the yearly Hugo Award winners and nominees. Sometimes they are middle entries in long running series, which is worth checking on Wikipedia if you like to start at Book 1. Usually it is just going to mean the whole series is great.
How about a few great authors who have all won?
Ursula K LeGuin
Lois McMaster Bujold
CJ Cherryh
Connie Willis
Jo WaltonIt's a very observant novel about love and marriage and adultery and divorce in most every permutation, life and death and meaning.
It's different every time I read it and has something to say to readers in any phase of life.
Depending on your feelings about the songs, of course.
Diamonds makes me cringe.
Asked and answered. They are for everyone.
So a lot depends on the niche. Big awesome service, performance, security, frontend, startup, tools... Cost center or profit center. Secret consumer project or retail.
You can't blame companies for operating within the four corners of the law. Perhaps you would prefer that they break the law.
In contrast, you will never see emacs inside of vim.
They are not useless abstractions for people to write mathematical papers about. These ideas are what enable you to proceed deeper when your framework leaks and breaks.
Anyway we are probably in violent agreement.
You don't want to use the right software language or framework with the wrong approach. You want to be able to reason clearly about the core problem and understand the tradeoffs of different classic solutions. Or invent a brand new approach. Or invent a framework or invent a language if necessary.
Consider this a plug for at least undergrad level education in CS. You can learn most of the rest of it on the job, but not computational thinking.
Its gameplay lacks depth and has some annoying sections even, but as interactive narrative it has few rivals.