Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Heck, my kids are theoretically engineers (at least their degree says so!), but even buying BackBlaze for them, I can't even get them to hit Ctrl-S from time-to-time. I think their mom must have fucked the milkman, because she is smarter than this herself...
Comment · 5 years ago
Well, I don't know how old you were, but ECC has existed in college for a long time - but may not have been so useful to a lot of engineers building machines (for sure), at the time.
Comment · 5 years ago
Nicely written. For certain.

Would it be cruel to suggest that you might want to advance a bit more before weighng in ?

I'd say that semiconductor physics, real math, control systems, real mixed signal and a couple of others should get a go ... but my eldest child didn't get much past this, so maybe the state of the art today?

Again- I mean no cruelty in my comments, but seems as if modern curricula are not teaching a person what a person needs to know to go into any related industry job...

(And I could be wrong - as I often am)

Comment · 5 years ago
Hell, I get more than that for child-support (while funding their ivy league schools)!
Comment · 5 years ago
I prefer ray-tracers (or other rendering or physics engines), maybe because I'm old or have nothing to blog about.
Comment · 5 years ago
I pay (personally) for the entire Jetbrains tool set. They are damn good. And I guess to be fair, I haven't given a lot of time to VSCode, but TBH: I find that Sublime and IntelliJ cover the spectrum for me (which is Scala, Java, Kotlin, Python, C, Go and Typescript all with git support)

I'm not super exploratory, because it always seems that I have a project due in two weeks, but given that I have pickd up two of the BEAM languages, but am always lagging on learning Ruby and Haskell. These days - I'm starting to wonder about the utility of learning another language, other than re-learning Smalltalk out of nostalgia.

Comment · 5 years ago
THEY cover at 10m. You get the low-rez version. Better than the 90m before, so who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Comment · 5 years ago
Why? You can just copy the link, open a new tab, past it in the URL bar and see the material...
Comment · 5 years ago
Edit- planet fall was also fun - these were a nice mix-up with Sirtech"s Wizardry... "A Kobold"
Comment · 5 years ago
How about Hitchhiker's? There were a couple of frustrating bits there. Gosh - I must have played a dozen of those things - and now, being old, I probably couldn't remember what I did, and am probably too stupid to figure it out again. (Or I have other things to do than beat my head against the wall ... or all the above)
Comment · 5 years ago
> There basically no amount of money that it would not have been worth it to spend.

Maybe!

But, while the transmission rate appears to be sort of high - the fatality rate seems to be low (and getting lower as we figure out effective treatment protocols). I guess I personally don't think it was worth killing the economy over it.. Isolate "at risk people" (say over 75-or-so?) In fact, at least in the US - I think the shutdown caused more harm than the disease (although reasonable people often draw different conclusions from the same data...)

Comment · 5 years ago
Photon mapping. I've never gotten radiosity debugged properly. I tend to like Reyes as something that works for NURB tersellation for me than the triangle interpolation thing. It could be that I'm a lazy programmer that has trouble with textures using classic z-buff techniques.
Comment · 5 years ago
The way I implement REYES, it does. But no doubt- Kajiya was the man.
Comment · 5 years ago
Well, the algorithm was developed in the 1600's, but I remember Turner Whitted's 1979 SIGGRAPH paper blowing me away. I mean, sure, they were slow, but before REYES, they were about the only solution to GlobIlum. (Forward from the lights and backwards from the camera - you could even do specular lighting!)
Comment · 5 years ago
What's weird to me is how freaked out people are about this. I get that it is a higher risk than a lightening strike, but given that the absolute number of deaths in 2020 was lower than 2019 (even given that deaths of despair were up significantly), I'm thinking our society has turned into a bunch of nervous nellies. Or maybe city folk don't think they should ever get to die.

In any case, the scared worried self-isolating comments I have read in this thread from "man-folk" make me think that when we got rid of TB and SPox and Polion - we probably got rid of Testosterone at the same time.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton