dkhar
Joined 12 years ago
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164
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31
Member since
Jul 2
Recent submissions
Comment · 11 years ago
I remember when that whole snafu was on the HN front page! :)
(This isn't the exact link I remember seeing, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3666564 )
Comment · 11 years ago
If you want knowledge from the same pool Ritter's drawing from, check out this blog post[1] about fr-041: Debris by ryg. Now, keep in mind, Ritter didn't do work on Debris as far as I know, but he's spent a lot of time with the people who did, and some of the ideas in NOWHERE have their origin in that scene (a lot of it is totes original, but you're asking about procedural generation, and procedural generation is definitely a demoscene thing).
Before game dev, Ritter was known as a musician and a demoscener (if you don't know what the demoscene is, do some googling -- it's deffo worth it). The demoscene group he was part of broke exciting new ground in the mid 2000s by releasing some productions that packed ridiculous amounts of content into a very small size by procedurally generating lots of things, like textures and geometry. The greatest of these demos is called Debris[2], and some consider it the best demo ever. Ryg's article is basically a big index of articles explaining how parts of Debris were written, as well as how they work.
[1] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/debris-opening-the-...
[2] Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxfmxi-boyo
and keep in mind that everything you're seeing was rendered in real time by a single executable 177kb in size.
[3?] Also worth looking at: http://www.iquilezles.org/www/index.htm
Comment · 12 years ago
On the subject of interesting magnetic effects, a lot of people don't know that pretty much all matter is magnetic, just that the strength of the interaction is a lot smaller than what we're used to with ferromagnets.
All materials exhibit a diamagnetic (pushes against the field) effect, but in many materials, that effect is overwhelmed by a competing paramagnetic (pushes in the direction of the field) effect. Most of the things we call "magnets" exhibit ferromagnetism, which typically produces much stronger forces than either of the previous two.
H2O is particularly interesting, because it's actually diamagnetic, and will push away from magnetic fields. Given a strong enough magnet, you can have a lot of fun with this effect by putting common water-filled objects in its field: http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/
Comment · 12 years ago
Sound intensity actually falls off as 1/r², and here's a source:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/acoustic/invsqs.h...
Comment · 12 years ago
In my experience, the Thai restaurants around me (East coast US) like to make their sauces very oil/butter heavy, which contributes to the second phenomenon you alluded to. I've never been to Thailand, so I don't know if this is an exclusively American phenomenon or not.
I personally really like a good Lat na, but what I'm served is often noodles in a thick, chicken flavored grease (rather than stock or gravy).
Comment · 12 years ago
It's the registry, not Docker itself.
This analogy might help: Docker Registry is to Docker as Github is to Git.
Comment · 12 years ago
I have a friend who used to keep excitedly showing me his crazy, impressive redstone ALU/CPU designs. I kept trying to get him to buy an FPGA and build out something with real hardware, but he maintained that a big part of why it was fun was because of the environment and community that came with Minecraft. That might go some way toward providing an explanation.
Comment · 12 years ago
This is a good opportunity to plug ORE, a Minecraft community specifically for this kind of thing:
That video on their main page is mind-boggling to me.
I have a friend who's a regular on that server, and he would occasionally explain to me things like how they take advantage of how Minecraft's redstone handling works to shave precious ticks off the latest ALU design's return time, or how they created a fully vanilla-compatible "internet," to pass data through wires between different people's machines.
They've got mods set up to copy and paste blocks, so you can build modular systems out of components and avoid repetitive block-placing, but AFAIK, everything else is vanilla. It's incredible.
Comment · 12 years ago
Well, some classic "high school English literature class" books that fulfill that criteria are Miller's Death of a Salesman and Wharton's Ethan Frome.
Still in the Western classical canon, Puccini's Madame Butterfly is fantastic, if you're into opera.
Comment · 12 years ago
It looks like that's the case -- none of the example images on the front page work for me.
Comment · 12 years ago
DeepFace's figures[1] also come from running it on the LFW dataset[2]. While Facebook's production tech will be more accurate because of what you say, the Deepface algorithm has a lot of raw power, too!
[1] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ranzato/publications/taigman_cvpr...
Comment · 12 years ago
That was an interesting article/book summary. The main idea (that there exists a correlation artistic creativity and mood disorders) is something I've observed anecdotally.
I get the impression, however, that it serves the end of history and entertainment more than it does those of science. The examples in the article were light on sample sizes and heavy on speculation ("Is mental illness caused by creativity? Maybe it's the other way around! Who knows?"). I wonder if the book it's about offers more solid corroborating sources.
I study physics and materials science at the College of William and Mary, work with silly amounts of data at Zoomdata, grow succulents, collect ginger ale, sleep, blink my eyes, and more!
Science-y topics I'm interested in include: Sound and music, polymers and biopolymers, ergonomics from ID and UXD perspectives, statistics, cogsci in marketing, machine learning (especially for mapping and navigating spaces), NLP that doesn't hurt my head, distributed query planning, the demoscene, game design, graphical programming, and sound synthesis.
As the above list might evince, I'm more of a generalist than a specialist.
You can reach me at (my username) + "[email protected]"
Feel free to send me an email, or many! If you want to talk, offer your opinion/help/expertise about something, or want my opinion/help/"expertise", I'm game!