winterismute

Is this another Frog Fractions?

Why did this get so many upvotes? It's well written, but isn't it just a trivial guide on how to do a pull request? Not trying to be controversial, I'm just genuinely curious.

Well, it is true, of course. But I sometimes think about 2 things: - Somehow, we are working more [1] while not earning significantly more, and we do while progress promised us shorter hours in the past. Hence I guess the phenomenon is just getting worse? - My father (I'm originally from Italy) dropped out from school when he was 16, and many of the parents of my friends had a similar experience. We never have the impression they strongly shared our views on the issue. Like, maybe they also experienced it, but they still reject the idea it is a general problem and simply attribute it to weak, singular case and so on. Not sure.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/18/news/economy/bernie-sanders-...

The feeling I am developing is that the success of dating apps correlates with the fact that people spend more and more time working/looking for a job. I am pretty not attractive but while in high-school/university I had multiple partners whom I would meet just in my daily life and I felt it was the same for most of my friends, but when we all started working full time (even doing very different things) everything changed suddenly for most of us. I felt it myself, I had little time to socialize with people because I would spend most of my time in a place where socializing is not only not among the top priorities but is in fact often discouraged (can cause conflict of interests etc). The same thing literally drove some of my friends crazy. After I moved (last year) to a different country for a new job (with a girl that had become my wife by that time) I (we) noticed how difficult it was to simply make new friends. Before, it was really easy to come across so many different kind of people, while now I meet mostly males who did an engineering degree to whom I can't anyway speak much. A very close friend I have of my same age recently told me, during a rather depressing conversation, that I did the best thing by marrying just after having started a professional career with the girl I met in Uni, because trying afterwards is just so much harder. Guys from work who are single just turn to dating apps, or go to courses on seduction etc. I do think a healthy society should try to address this issue, somehow.

Or even more, maybe a compelling reason for Britons to elect representatives in the government and EU parliament who could actually push the reforms the EU needs?

My father teaching me to type PKUNZIP on files that "ended with .zip" in the DOS shell (not long before the Norton Commander kind of GUI arrived to our computer) is one of my earliest memories as a toddler: I would ask him "What does it mean?" and he would simply not know. It was 1990 and I was 3 and a half I think. When I learned what it stood for it was kind of epic, for me.

Same here, in a way. Seems like he has actually not "reported these clearly problematic programs to more than 10 distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them.", as he stated in front of the EU parliament.

My wife was wondering whether this can be considered 100% healthy: don't you need plastic to reach a very high temperature to model it that way? Doesn't it start releasing whatever thing that might be carcinogenic or such?

My very humble opinion.

- Having had a number of friends doing research in the field of anthropology, I recently got to think it represents a bag of knowledge we could leverage on to answer very important questions, for example, "what is really the role of religion in our societies?". Governments are spending huge amount of money to defend from/attack terrorists that let themselves explode in name of a religion, but no money is spent to understand deeply how this is possible, and whether it is really what is the real role of religion in that.

- "Nutritionism", or whatever other word you like to mean "how what we eat impacts our well-being". We need to eat, but information on how we should do it to be healthier seems very contradictory.

As I was saying, the GPU pipeline we are all used to is still there. I have posted in another comment some presentations from the GDC 2014 which you might find interesting.

If you want to know a bit more about the details of the platform, these 2 presentations from GDC 2014 are still some valid material: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020741/New-Techniques-Made-Pos...

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020688/Practical-Techniques-fo...

> Also would be nice to know how well they can actually compute shaders, do tessellation and many other things because this is one heck of a fluff piece and I can remember at least 1 of these past 20 years that proclaimed that real time RT in hardware is here.

The chip iterates on "standard" GPU designs made to performed rasterization, therefore it has everything in place to launch compute jobs or do tessellation. In addition, they have some additional hardware for raytracing. From one of the previous GDC presentations it was more or less clear that you could programmatically activate raytracing with a configurable number of rays and those rays will deliver additional lighting contributions to the objects of the scene.

Agree with this. In my undergraduate, 2nd year course of Opeating Systems, one day (pretty soon after the start) the teacher decided to write a small terminal emulator in C to show us what it really does, just there, in the classroom. It took him 2 hours of coding, but it really changed my perspective on how things really work in a UNIX based system, and on always checking in depth whether something that sounds like almost impossible really is.

Having finished yesterday "Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA" it is kind of funny to see this trending on HN today. My knowledge of biology and genetics is kind of basic, but I did enjoy the book, and I was wondering what other people that are more into the field might think about it.

I lived the last 5 years in the NL, as a foreigner, where I finished a MSc. In the last, say, 2 years I have been working full-time, and I noticed how throwing house parties became harder being in my late-20s: people have tight schedules, need to commute early because of work etc. Nonetheless, with my partner, we threw a handful each year. We lived in shared house but it was big, with a backyard and ok neighbors. We would always have some kind of big dinner and then mostly gather around the fire outside, sometimes watching stuff with a projector on a canvas we would put on the back wall. Although always a lot of effort, I really enjoyed it, it creates a nice and safe space so that people can be really open with each other, I have seen many people getting to know each other and "relationships" (work/feelings related) bootstrap. We have recently moved to the UK, outside London, in a smaller house. I don't know much of the people and the town, and I am observing on myself how I spend more time on the internet or watching movies. Maybe it's not related to being in 2015, maybe it's just that after 25 in modern societies it gets more difficult to get close to people. I wonder if it is a problem that a private or public venture could address in an innovative way.

Amsterdam has basically an entire website on the matter: http://www.iamsterdam.com/en/local/work It also links to search engine with moderately up-to-date vacancies: http://www.iamsterdam.com/en/local/work/working-in-amsterdam... The search application is an older version of one of products developed by Textkernel, they have a number of positions open: http://www.textkernel.com/company/jobs/

Disclousure: I am currently working for Textkernel

Only partially related, but still: some friends are working on a game in which you play as a "banker" from middle ages until modern times. It is mainly a city "sim" game but that should also make you think about what is money and what it represents. They would love any feedback: http://moneymakerdeluxe.com/

I grew up in one of the Italian cities that adopted the "limited traffic zone" approach many years ago (Bologna). The fact is that many Italian cities were designed basically in the middle age and they have not changed much since then, hence they have very narrow streets, crossings, and sometimes wide sidewalks. They are simply not made for cars. Anyway, in the last years, the new administration additionally decided to completely "ban" cars from the main streets during weekends and public holidays: no cars of no type, no taxis, bus routes changed to only reach the beginning of the closed roads but they did introduce a small bus line that goes around the closed down zone. The idea was highly criticized at the beginning mainly by the business owners located there, who were afraid of seeing a sharp decline of customers. Instead, after a first period, those "T days" became a success: people re-discovered the pleasure of just walking everywhere on the streets, more and more events were organized, and also shops saw an increase in revenue, and in fact now they are asking to extend this ban to more days. Personally, I think we should start realizing that cars have put high cost on society in terms of pollution, safety, low efficiency in the use of resources (fuel), stress related to jams (which is a clear alienating experience). Maybe banning them from everywhere is not the solution, but at least the idea that every family must own (at least) a car should be publicly questioned.

Where I currently work (< 60 employees), management decided to try to switch to a flat structure similar to what is described in this handbook. We are still in the bootstrapping phase. However, I noticed that I could not find a lot of serious/deep evaluation material, like, companies that really did it and discussed it in retrospective, nor anything similar in management literature. Also, I noticed that there are no good sw tools that help you organizing, the standard SCRUM tools are not enough and instead we would like to have something that allows to easily keep track of who is working on what and how, let's say more about the connections between the "teams" than their progress. Any tips?

I am not from the NL but I have moved here to attend a MSc program (Computer Science department), I am not pursuing a PhD myself but I know a lot of people that do. I think that the system has its pros and cons, as always, although I don't agree with the part about not choosing the topic because (as also other people pointed out) policies can often vary from supervisor to supervisor, and in any case a student basically chooses, more or less, the boundaries of his/her topic when he/she decides to which position apply, positions that always have fairly clear project descriptions and include contact details of professors that are generally open about clarifications. Also, even if it is formally difficult to change supervisor, in fact if a student decides to work more with another professor for any reason, the original supervisor does not usually raise any practical problem.

However, a big problem that I have experienced and seen is that PhDs negatively impact the quality of teaching. Master programs in the NL aim at being very high level (often succeeding), offering also courses on specific advanced subjects. Usually, PhDs have no control over what they will teach, they are simply allocated as "resources" by the faculty, even just to cover a minor part of a course or to supervise/correct practical assignments. This leads to ridiculous situations with courses that, for example, teach advanced rendering techniques but for supervising the practical part allocate a PhD candidate that has clearly never ever rendered a triangle on a screen in his/her life, and who had no time to properly prepare beforehand. I think this is a visible "weak point" of the whole system, and it should be addressed, somehow, also because I have noticed it being treated as some kind of "taboo argument" in the past.

I had the privilege of meeting Carlo Rovelli (who attended university in my hometown, many years before me) in a public event targeting people that, like me, were at the time finishing high school and had to choose what to do with their lives. We showed up already bored, waiting for the usual adults who would explain us why to study this and not that, what are the many possible career paths achievable by that, which economic sectors were growing and how, and so on. In fact, some of the speakers did mostly that. On the contrary, Rovelli started to explain how he did not know what to do after school, and that he went to university initially because his family would have forced him to work as a plumber with his uncle if he decided not to go. He then advised us to choose to do only what we feel passionate about, and to distrust whoever, truth in hand, will explain us that by studying X we will be able to enter sector Y and achieve great success in life. It can seem trivial stuff, but when you are 18 and are being told those things by a humble but successful person, it really empowers you. He is also fairly easy to "approach", he himself came to speak to us after the event, joking about the fact we should not cut our hair "just to get a job" (I haven't since then, and I am 28 and working), hence I am not surprised he answers to people's comment on the interview, or that he is active on physics.stackexchange, for example.

I have studied computer science and got interested in physics and philosophy of science thanks to him, he kind of embodies my idea of science, and of civil responsibility, and I must say I have been a bit disappointed to see that also the academic world is full of "scientists" that underestimate the value of philosophy or other related subjects, or that teach students not to question "too much" what they are doing, preventing them to really see the "big picture" behind knowledge.

Yes, navigation meshes can be created either automatically, by a designer, or through a mixture of the 2 (usually they are first computed and then adjusted by someone). Indeed, automatic and stable generation is essential in case of big, procedurally generated scenes, and it would be in general a nice achievement for the field. gmaslov provided links that explain some common ways of generating navigation meshes, that quickly looked to me like improved/refined application of the "flood filling" method. I just wanted to point out that there is a very interesting way (imho) of generating a 2D/multilayered navigation mesh, which is, by computing the Generalized Voronoi Diagram of the obstacles and then by annotating the vertices (and thus edges) of the graph with information about the closest obstacles' points. This way, we have both a "backbone graph" and a subdivision (a mesh). Here is a link to the related research of my Uni: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gerae101/motion_planning/ecm... check it out if you are interested, there are also a couple of summarizing images and videos. The advantage is that such meshes are smoother, compact, yet they ensure very good coverage of the walkable space.

Disclaimer: I am a MSc student working on the above method for my final thesis (involving GPGPU steps and a true multi-tiled approach).

On the philosophical side, I sugget "Existentialism Is a Humanism" by Sartre: it explains in a clear and simple way the idea of Existentialism, which is a great philosophy based on strong principles, and a key idea in the modern philosophical debate. It somehow changed my life, and made me think a lot more about life principles that can actually guide one's life.