Hacker News Reader

JonnieCacheon Building, and Losing, a Career on Facebook

Free access to all past media online caused culture to suddenly halt just after the turn of the century, and turn from a directed timeline, where fashion mimicked the advancement of technology, into a weird swirling self-referential ironic vortex of ahistorical relativity.

This made me extremely anxious for a good while, fortunately the emergence of PC music has basically cured that: https://soundcloud.com/shhsecretsongs/gfoty-my-song https://soundcloud.com/pcmus/wannabe

JonnieCacheon Building, and Losing, a Career on Facebook

>chaotic nerdy

lol. What would be the opposite I wonder? Lawful preppy?

JonnieCacheon The Forgotten 'China Girls' Hidden at the Beginning of Old Films

Christ, I'd forgotten how grim these were.

JonnieCacheon Researchers are beginning to disentangle pain relief from addiction and overdose

I've always wondered about the relationship between america's opiate habit and the afghan poppy harvest. The US army was burning millions (billions?) of dollars worth of poppies every year, to deny profit to the taliban. Could that not have been used to make pain pills? How do the incentives flow here?

JonnieCacheon Spinner

Really? I got 3148825 back within about two seconds.

JonnieCacheon Spinner

I wonder what the process is, as a google engineer, to get the artwork done for something like this? Do you just put in a ticket and some time later the SVGs turn up in your repo? Is there an artwork queue, or is it a political fight for access to the illustrators time?

JonnieCacheon Spinner

Works fine on firefox desktop for me. Its some kind of locale issue I think, as others have suggested.

JonnieCacheon Spinner

https://www.google.com/search?q=10m+timer

My favourite is still this though: https://www.google.com/search?q=3*cos(sqrt(x*x%2By*y))%2B5

JonnieCacheon Mathematicians bring ocean to life for Disney's 'Moana'

To put this in perspective, 60fps == ~16.7ms per frame.

That's 16.7ms to run your WHOLE game engine, you get some fraction of that left over to do rendering.

JonnieCacheon TensorKart: self-driving MarioKart with TensorFlow

This is indeed what they do. Mario Kart 64 is known for having the most egregious rubberbanding ever.

JonnieCacheon TensorKart: self-driving MarioKart with TensorFlow

In contrast, here's what is effectively an oracle machine playing mario kart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBNgbJ5hXtQ

(Amazingly detailed) info: http://tasvideos.org/5243S.html

JonnieCacheon Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

It has a user definable order of preference across all SSIDs which you can tweak in network preferences.

JonnieCacheon It’s a-me: How Super Mario became a global cultural icon

Hyper Light Drifter, released this year, comes close for me. Imagine a cross between alttp and dark souls, with the art style and music of fez. It's superb.

It's not as expansive or elaborate as the snes marios or zeldas, but the gameplay is very polished and deep, and the plot is... well I won't spoil it ;)

JonnieCacheon It’s a-me: How Super Mario became a global cultural icon

The reason it still looks good now is because they created a timeless art style with clear, readable sprites which didn't need many colors. Compare that with 16-bit era attempts at photorealism which look muddy today.

The same is true of Metroid Prime on the gamecube, which looks better than some modern games despite hardware which was underpowered even at the time, due to masterful art direction.

JonnieCacheon It’s a-me: How Super Mario became a global cultural icon

https://www.twitch.tv/602race

info: http://bombch.us/giU

(yes, speedrunners have their own, zelda themed url shortener.)

JonnieCacheon Carrie Fisher has died

I thought it looked like a PS4 cutscene tbh. I think if you play video games then you're primed to notice the facial animation techniques.

JonnieCacheon FreeDOS 1.2

I think they're just making an ironic comment about how times have changed.

JonnieCacheon “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

And the scene in the barn with the animals all around, c'mon.

JonnieCacheon Wolfenstein 3D – Gameboy cartridge with co-processor

There are people out there making new NES games and selling them on real carts. They go for about $40; obviously they don't typically include ARM coprocessors. Sometimes they have blinkenlights though.

https://www.retrousb.com/index.php?cPath=30

JonnieCacheon Postmodernism Generator

It attempts to describe certain aspects of human cultural interaction, broadly defined.

I'm not defending it, I share the opinions of many of it's detractors, my point is only that to describe a technical subject you don't understand as incomprehensible nonsense is silly.

JonnieCacheon Postmodernism Generator

As I understand it, you could sum it up as: categorizations and abstractions are primarily instruments of power and control, rather than tools to further understanding. The true purpose of categories or classifications is to place people or concepts outside of them, and thus to denigrate and dominate them. Categories or labels have no "real" meaning except to serve this malign purpose.

Part of the reason why these people originally wrote in such a strange way was because they wanted to try and write without applying the traditional categories and modes of thought we've all been raised with.

Disclaimer: I'm not qualified to tell you this and you shouldn't listen to me. I'd welcome correction from someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

JonnieCacheon Postmodernism Generator

>I interpreted the text in a different way.

Maybe you should write a paper :)

JonnieCacheon Postmodernism Generator

I wonder what people with literary theory degrees make of RFCs. Much the same I imagine.

JonnieCacheon Postmodernism Generator

Really? I mean it uses some slightly unusual words (shibboleth, demarcation, unbecoming) but these are hardly technical terms, you'll find them in stories for children or teenagers. There are no complex or difficult sentences in there.

JonnieCacheon How Unix made it to the top

>The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us

Is there a writeup of this anywhere? If stuff has been backported/upstreamed/whatever from the PS4 to the freeBSD kernel that would truly be living the dream!

JonnieCacheon How to make Linux more trustworthy

The other notable thing about deterministic builds is that they are needed for the nix package manager.

JonnieCacheon GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

You sometimes hear stuff about how github has all these internal problems now, since they got rid of their special rug or whatever, but is there any evidence of this spilling over into the projects they host?

As far as I can tell projects are still managing themselves as they and their leaders see fit. Seems fine to me.

The spectre of spooky SJWs haunting silicon valley shouldn't be the thing prompting people to consider redundancy in their source code management.

JonnieCacheon Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

There are lots of other people on the subway who can alert staff that cleaning needs doing.

JonnieCacheon Hyper 1.0.0

Pretty sure iterm does all those things, except maybe the collapsable output.

JonnieCacheon Why a Post-Nuclear World Would Look Nothing Like “Mad Max”

Threads has to be the most upsetting film I've seen.