DarkTree

Your experience seems related to my issue ever since I left college.

I really enjoy my personal time and relish the idea of coming home on a Friday with no social plans or obligations, so that I can do my own thing, read, or program some personal projects. I highly value learning, and it is hard for me to be disciplined if I'm being social during the week. So sometimes I just keep to myself all week. I exercise after work, come home and make a nice dinner, program and read about the things I love, and I love doing this.

My problem is that after doing this for extended periods of time, I actually start to get sad and feel like I'm constantly optimizing my life for nothing, because what's the point of life if you don't share it with others? So then I switch gears and try to be as social as possible, and start enjoying life as I meet new people and come home late at night after an epic outing with my friends, laying down in my bed feeling happy and satisfied with my decisions (a significant part of this feeling is being drunk for sure). And slowly but surely, the feeling comes creeping up: I've lost touch with who I am, everything I learned weeks ago was for nothing because now I'm forgetting it, and I'm wasting my time and hurting my future by being too social.

I guess it's just hard for me to strike a balance. I think I like to go all in on things and so I feel like this chronic teeter-totter is going to be my life for a while.

Man, I just never get tired of reading pretty much anything about Id. I think I speak for a lot of programmers, and not just game devs, when I say that the romanticization of Id's history has painted one of the most ideal programmer stories, and one that I often have fantasized living, or at least have imagined what it would have been like to be on that team in the glory days.

I never played Commander Keen, or Wolfenstein 3D, or even Doom, which were all before my time. But when all my friends were getting high speed internet and playing the newest FPS games online, I dreamed of the day I'd have a computer good enough and connection fast enough to join in on the fun. Then one of my older family friends gave me his old copy of Quake 3 Arena, and suddenly I was thrown into this unbelievably fun world of online death matches. Even on my weak family desktop, I could play the game with good FPS. This was my first real interest in computers.

Then when I started programming and learning the history of the field, I of course came across the Id team and connected the dots between my first online gaming experience, programming, and how Id created these games with it. It's been one of those magical "good old days" of programming culture that I look back on for inspiration and motivation and why I like this field so much.

So I'm pretty ignorant to the history of personal identity/credit breaches, but for those who aren't, is this only getting to get worse? More and more companies are holding more and more data, to the point that these breaches seem to affect so many people. I entered the credit card game pretty recently, and almost immediately I'm affected by the Equifax breach. As a young person, this doesn't make the future of privacy/security seem so promising.

Yeah I can understand the motivation for creating this. When I first started browsing HN, I couldn't believe how supplemental, civil and noiseless the comments were. However, after several years, I've started to jump straight to the comments, especially when I have a vague clue about what the article is about. That's when I don't feel the incentive to actually read and create my own opinions. I've also started to view HN as more entertainment than education because of the way I consume it, instead of the how I used to believe speeding over comments was informative. I've since accepted that it is entertainment veiled as education. I still learn more here than any other news source I follow.

In Bill Bryson's book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, he talks about the dangers of Yellowstone and how catastrophic the eruption would be, however, he also points out that these potential eruptions are often preceded by a period of elevated signs of volcanic activity, which as I understand, Yellowstone is not currently experiencing. Of course, geological timelines are impossible to predict, but until I read that book, I didn't even know Yellowstone was dangerous and wouldn't have found out until reading this article.

I think a lot of people can relate to this. I was always afraid of asking questions when surrounded by people more knowledgable than myself. I didn't want to appear stupid, or ignorant by not knowing something I assumed I should have already learned. I later realized that it makes so much more sense to bite the bullet and ask the question the first time. The longer you go pretending to know something, the more embarrassing it becomes when you have to eventually ask what it is later. The people who do this are the ones who appear knowledgable in later situations.

I really envy your ability to get hypnotized by a book, and I've heard others have similar binge reading sessions quite frequently. I love reading. I read every morning and night, but I can only read for about an hour at a time. I do read mainly non-fiction, and I'm wondering if that has anything to do with it. However, I'm drawn towards non-fiction more, so wouldn't I prefer longer reading sessions for the books I'm interested in the most?

You can see a visualization of the approaching hurricane here: https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/ort...

> I'll never understand what motivates people to shit all over content they consider below them.

Almost always rooted in the person's own insecurities

I agree. But man, what an incredible world we live in that we have people literally willing to put their life on the line for causes like this.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I believe you meant, "the medium doesn't change the message". I disagree that everyone feels this way, based on evidence of how I feel when receiving a text message vs. a phone call.

Maybe it's because it personally takes me more effort to make a phone call, or the added tone of voice, or maybe it's just the instant dialogue that the call creates. Calls will always be more special to me than a facebook message. Just as a handwritten birthday letter in the mail is more special than the same message in a text.

Yeah I only found this by searching for it after hearing about its existence from another news source. Pretty sad

I agree with your skepticism of the author's conclusion. For example, we only know that the location/timing of the asteroid impact was so devastating because it did in fact hit there and so we were able to study it and find the "smoking gun", in other words, it wasn't obvious. But how can you assume that if it hit somewhere else at some other time that we wouldn't have found some hidden life-ending mechanism in that event as well?

Honestly, it may not be at the level you are describing here now, but I have been overwhelmed by the ability I've had to find small figments of memories with Google search. For example, I had a faint memory of a movie I watched as 4 year old, and could only remember a few generic nouns describing it, and after a few minutes of searching I was able to pinpoint. This wasn't possible years ago, either because the search engine itself wasn't ready, or that the information simply wasn't on the web. Now both of those are true, and only becoming more so, so they are improving in tandem.

I'm pretty confident I can find something on the web by only knowing a few keys words.

Cool blog post about how NatGeo's 3D tour of the fossil was created using Three.js in the browser.

https://source.opennews.org/articles/resurrecting-dragon/

This still supports your argument, but the wikipedia entry has a different meaning of the phrase "Apple of my eye".

From the wiki entry[0]: "Its meaning does indeed derive from an expression signifying the pupil of the eye, one of the most sensitive parts of the body. For example, one can tolerate an eyelash on the white of his eye, but let it barely touch the pupil, and everything else is of secondary importance."

It's kind of funny though, I always assumed it was like saying, "out of all the apples around me, you're the one that I notice, the one apple I see with my eye". And all of these definitions kind of hint at the same point. Definitely a misunderstood quote.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_of_my_eye

There's also Bell Lab's "picturephone" from the 19060s(!), that despite market research showing would be a hit, ended up being quite a market failure.

http://ethw.org/Picturephone

Wow, didn't know about that feature. Thanks for mentioning!

I've had Spotify for 5 years or so, and mostly used it to look up songs I already liked, and to create playlists to listen to while studying/working/programming. It was already pretty awesome for that. Then I started checking out the "Related Artist" section, and started discovering new music after such a hiatus of music discovery since my younger years.

But where Spotify has really just excelled, and dare I say changed the way I listen to music, is their newer ways of discovering music. Now I can make a playlist with all of my favorites, and then just check out the "Recommended Songs" section to find new favorites. And now I start most work weeks off listening to the "Discover Weekly" playlist and drag the songs I like over to my playlists. The amount of new music I've discovered hasn't been this volume since middle school.

A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson).

It's a cursory overview of all of history (title) from the dawn of time to the evolution of humans. It seems to be only slightly dated in some information, but really interesting to learn how the knowledge we assume is true today came to fruition over time.

Before that,

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Ben R. Rich)

Such an awesome book about not only the engineering feats achieved by Lockheed Martin during the Cold War Era, but the incredible ability to keep developments secret from the mostly everyone. If you want to know more about the purpose of Area51, check it out.

> "I woke up one guy and he sort of said, 'Oh, hey.' Then when I went by, I think he discreetly woke up his buddies because when I looked down they were all three standing there like 'What the f*?' "

What an awesome story for a climber: "I was woken up on the wall by the first guy to free solo El Cap"

Seems to load and run faster than most webpages. Really cool and a promising example of WebAssembly

Yeah this describes my habits as well. I used to think that reddit served a similar, though watered-down purpose that HN does. I've since accepted that Reddit is more entertainment for me, much as FB is. The comments section on popular submissions can be unbearable and it has especially been alienating with the Trump vs. Liberal hate/name-calling being spewed back and forth.

I think multi-reddits can be great, as you can isolate yourself from the mess of r/all, but unfortunately the comments sections on the subreddits I'm interested in are nowhere near parity with HN. Furthermore, the subreddits carry a lot of noise submissions that I feel aren't as strongly represented on the the front pages of HN.

Oddly, I have found YouTube has taken an increasingly large portion of my internet time. There are a ton of really informative, good quality education videos being pushed onto YT today, for example 3Blue1Brown's math content comes to mind [0]. However, the comments sections for most videos is maybe only millimeters above being worthless at best, and detracting on average.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3blue1brown

I get this sentiment, but man, there are some really great, high quality (cinematography, acting, sound, creativity) tv shows being made today, albeit most on streaming/premium services. I've experienced tv that has moved me as much, if not more than many books I've read. To think that this medium is mindless or unnecessary completely undermines so much of the art and thought that goes into crafting some of these shows. I think the issue is drawing the line between film made as art, and the sort of vapid shows that this quote is most likely referring to.

> What you want to do is start from the bottom and build up (essentially building a software 3D engine)

How do you suggest starting this?

Thanks for the comparison. Though they are complementary, would you recommend reading one before the other?

I'll check them out, thanks!

I just bought Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra so that I can read it along with watching his MIT lectures. I'm wondering how that will compare to this book/course.

Has anyone here already taken a similar path and what did you think?

My main interests are in graphics programming, so I'm hoping to apply what I learn from the course to that.

If anyone else has any recommendations on other areas of math, courses, or books in general for learning CG, that would be much appreciated!

Work out right after work to clear my mind and reenergize, as well as get a little non-work related social interaction.

Make a nice dinner, shower and get warm and clean, then work on some side programming projects in my lamp-lit bedroom (which is the best part of my night because it's completely quiet, calming atmosphere, and I get to focus on learning exactly what I want to).

Then write down my good/bad thoughts on the day in a journal, and finally finish off the night by reading a book before I go to sleep.

Yet another example of how the tv show, Silicon Valley, hits the nail on the head [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAEAbqrE5Zw