muyyatin

If it's in orbit, yes. I thought the discussion was based on something sitting on the surface of the Earth.

But, ignoring things like air resistance, the lower the thrust is, the more delta-V/energy it takes to escape?

For instance, if you had a rocket with a fixed delta-V and it used all of its energy almost instantaneously, say it escapes from Earth. But if you lower its thrust so that it is not accelerating upward (lower than the force of gravity), it could use the same delta-V without leaving the ground.

I've been tracking a number of differences between how browsers render Canvas content: http://jonathan-olson.com/notes/canvas-browser-specific-quir..., and take advantage of it to use the same code to generate a different picture in every browser (http://jonathan-olson.com/experiments/browser-specific-conte...)

I'll probably need to add this one to the list!

It's somewhat similar to a Flash-only website, since it has less support and most notably lacks many of the features HTML makes easy (search engine indexing, browser search-and-find, ease of development, layout, and separation of content from style).

Sorry about that! I had someone else report that it fails across all browsers with the HD4400.

Sorry about that! Do you mind if I ask what browser and/or graphics card caused this?

I just checked http://www.browserleaks.com/webgl on Win 7, and Firefox 30's ANGLE uses Direct3D 9, whereas Chrome's Canary (v38, best performance) uses Angle with Direct3D 11.

Firefox might upgrade this sometime, but Aurora (Firefox 32) still uses Direct3D 9.

I've done some similar implementations years ago (but with C/OCaml, nothing on the GPU), so I didn't refer to many things for this.

Fresnel reflectance is based off of http://mathinfo.univ-reims.fr/IMG/pdf/Combined_rendering_of_..., although I'm not doing any spectral or polarization-dependent code right now (I wanted to leave that open, and it allows accurate metal simulation).

I tinkered with a blend of some pseudorandomness functions until getting something that worked.

https://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/rayt... was used for ray-box intersection.

The distance function experiment for the drinking glass is based off of the concept of http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfun... (like raymarching, includes normal computation).

I consulted http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/ to see the best way to do accumulation (and made some realism fixes in https://github.com/jonathanolson/webgl-path-tracing, see https://github.com/evanw/webgl-path-tracing/pull/1 for details).

Many other things can be pulled from online or from books like http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Design-Interactive-Technol....

Please let me know if you have any questions, (see my email at http://jonathan-olson.com/about), and please feel free to use my code however you like (things I wrote are MIT, but I use CC-by and CC-by-non-commercial HDR images).

Thanks!

Author here! It's very true that the GPU does the heavy lifting, although I'm not sure exactly where an "in the browser" line could be drawn (conceptually any page uses the browser as an execution engine and library).

It's a bit trickier due to restrictions in WebGL (OpenGL ES based) compared to the desktop (e.g. no bitwise operators makes it a pain to get randomness that doesn't bias the result), but it's basically the same.

Seems like it might make people more likely to run into camouflaged obstacles (particularly those vision-impaired). Imagine running through a park at night with camouflaged electrical boxes.

I heavily agree with painting artwork on them. A few blocks away, there is a painted electrical box that I have become quite attached to.

Taking test-driven development too literally?

I haven't seen it mentioned, but working for a university project funded by public and/or private grants (in my case for free educational software) is working quite well.

Very nice! I'm also working on a similar scene graph (Canvas/SVG, WebGL soon), which also has bounds, DAG-support, and implicitly inserts the needed layers for performance (http://phetsims.github.io/scenery/).

I look forward to seeing what other performance optimizations I may be missing!

It can also make UI code much more readable, but it also comes with the cost of making the bytecode much larger (each use of the double-brace initialization creates a new class).

So if 12 parents let their children play with knives (and the children were harmed) like the 12 instances for Buckyballs, we should ban all knives?

It seems like parents ignoring warning labels on an item not marketed towards children is the main issue (I wouldn't necessarily say the magnets were less dangerous either).

Any chance you have a NA account?

Typing in a particular phrase in the Google search box won't delete all of your mail and files, so you could think of it as a "safer" or "immutable" shell.

CLI in contrast can modify things, not just give you back information.

You are especially unkillable if you pick a very defensible location, like "mount evans"

Your proxy wouldn't send the user's cookies with its request.

It seems like the statement of (1) is an admission that we aren't accurate at evaluating whether someone is "healthy" or "not healthy" to an acceptable level yet, since I would include precursors to cancer in my "healthy" classification.

The question looks extraordinarily vague. It doesn't seem to be written by someone with a large amount of math knowledge, as they want a "variable that allows us to change the weight given to either half of the equation." where the weight nor the equation is described.

Sorry I don't have a reference, but as long as you are outside of an object, its gravitational force on you is the same as if it were a point-mass (at least for classical physics).

Lots of CSS written in the wrong way can actually be pretty processor-heavy.

I'll bite.

For the 1st question, you are drawing only from families with boys (excludes families with 2 girls). Only a 1/3rd of picked families would have two boys, so 2/3rds have the girl as the other child.

For the 2nd question, if you are asking about whether Joseph's sibling is a girl, I think more information is needed.

How is the child named Joseph picked? If we assume that a random boy (regardless of family) is chosen to be named Joseph, 1/2 of boys have male siblings and 1/2 have female siblings (the boy-boy situation is double-counted if choosing a random boy), so it would be 1/2.

If we named Joseph by choosing a family with at least one boy and naming one of their boys "Joseph" randomly, you get the same 2/3rds as the 1st problem.

It would be interesting if they make a financial vehicle that turns US AA+ debt (along with something else) into AAA.

Light bounces off of objects, and so this may not be true.

Probably had the "showdead" option on in HN preferences.

Very true. StumbleUpon shows a much higher bounce rate and much lower average time on our site.

Money quote:

"If a company really does need to perform extensive validation and verification of its software, perhaps using a browser to deliver that software just isn't appropriate."