Hacker News: ci5er

New comment by ci5er in "VUW Accidentally Wipes Desktop Computers"

ci5er — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 12:51:03 +0000

Heck, my kids are theoretically engineers (at least their degree says so!), but even buying BackBlaze for them, I can't even get them to hit Ctrl-S from time-to-time. I think their mom must have fucked the milkman, because she is smarter than this herself...

New comment by ci5er in "My self-study plan for electrical engineering"

ci5er — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 05:49:11 +0000

Well, I don't know how old you were, but ECC has existed in college for a long time - but may not have been so useful to a lot of engineers building machines (for sure), at the time.

New comment by ci5er in "My self-study plan for electrical engineering"

ci5er — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 03:41:07 +0000

Nicely written. For certain.

Would it be cruel to suggest that you might want to advance a bit more before weighng in ?

I'd say that semiconductor physics, real math, control systems, real mixed signal and a couple of others should get a go ... but my eldest child didn't get much past this, so maybe the state of the art today?

Again- I mean no cruelty in my comments, but seems as if modern curricula are not teaching a person what a person needs to know to go into any related industry job...

(And I could be wrong - as I often am)

New comment by ci5er in "Why I did not go to jail (2014)"

ci5er — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 04:00:39 +0000

Hell, I get more than that for child-support (while funding their ivy league schools)!

New comment by ci5er in "Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary"

ci5er — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 16:52:16 +0000

I prefer ray-tracers (or other rendering or physics engines), maybe because I'm old or have nothing to blog about.

New comment by ci5er in "Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code"

ci5er — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 19:16:42 +0000

I pay (personally) for the entire Jetbrains tool set. They are damn good. And I guess to be fair, I haven't given a lot of time to VSCode, but TBH: I find that Sublime and IntelliJ cover the spectrum for me (which is Scala, Java, Kotlin, Python, C, Go and Typescript all with git support)

I'm not super exploratory, because it always seems that I have a project due in two weeks, but given that I have pickd up two of the BEAM languages, but am always lagging on learning Ruby and Haskell. These days - I'm starting to wonder about the utility of learning another language, other than re-learning Smalltalk out of nostalgia.

New comment by ci5er in "Fleets of radar satellites are measuring movements on Earth like never before"

ci5er — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 09:21:24 +0000

THEY cover at 10m. You get the low-rez version. Better than the 90m before, so who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth.

New comment by ci5er in "17 year old Firefox feature request fixed"

ci5er — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 01:28:24 +0000

Why? You can just copy the link, open a new tab, past it in the URL bar and see the material...

New comment by ci5er in "1977: Zork"

ci5er — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 04:03:04 +0000

Edit- planet fall was also fun - these were a nice mix-up with Sirtech"s Wizardry... "A Kobold"

New comment by ci5er in "1977: Zork"

ci5er — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 03:58:58 +0000

How about Hitchhiker's? There were a couple of frustrating bits there. Gosh - I must have played a dozen of those things - and now, being old, I probably couldn't remember what I did, and am probably too stupid to figure it out again. (Or I have other things to do than beat my head against the wall ... or all the above)

New comment by ci5er in "Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing"

ci5er — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:31:49 +0000

> There basically no amount of money that it would not have been worth it to spend.

Maybe!

But, while the transmission rate appears to be sort of high - the fatality rate seems to be low (and getting lower as we figure out effective treatment protocols). I guess I personally don't think it was worth killing the economy over it.. Isolate "at risk people" (say over 75-or-so?) In fact, at least in the US - I think the shutdown caused more harm than the disease (although reasonable people often draw different conclusions from the same data...)

New comment by ci5er in "I wrote a Raytracer for DOS, 16 VGA colors (2011) [video]"

ci5er — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 03:31:23 +0000

Photon mapping. I've never gotten radiosity debugged properly. I tend to like Reyes as something that works for NURB tersellation for me than the triangle interpolation thing. It could be that I'm a lazy programmer that has trouble with textures using classic z-buff techniques.

New comment by ci5er in "I wrote a Raytracer for DOS, 16 VGA colors (2011) [video]"

ci5er — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 03:20:47 +0000

The way I implement REYES, it does. But no doubt- Kajiya was the man.

New comment by ci5er in "I wrote a Raytracer for DOS, 16 VGA colors (2011) [video]"

ci5er — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 22:42:13 +0000

Well, the algorithm was developed in the 1600's, but I remember Turner Whitted's 1979 SIGGRAPH paper blowing me away. I mean, sure, they were slow, but before REYES, they were about the only solution to GlobIlum. (Forward from the lights and backwards from the camera - you could even do specular lighting!)

New comment by ci5er in "Things I Didn't Learn in 2020"

ci5er — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 14:29:55 +0000

What's weird to me is how freaked out people are about this. I get that it is a higher risk than a lightening strike, but given that the absolute number of deaths in 2020 was lower than 2019 (even given that deaths of despair were up significantly), I'm thinking our society has turned into a bunch of nervous nellies. Or maybe city folk don't think they should ever get to die.

In any case, the scared worried self-isolating comments I have read in this thread from "man-folk" make me think that when we got rid of TB and SPox and Polion - we probably got rid of Testosterone at the same time.

New comment by ci5er in "Governments spurred the rise of solar power"

ci5er — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 18:10:05 +0000

What happened with CIGS? There was a privately funded CIGS company here in Austin TX that also didn't make it (even though the founders and investors were solid) and I've not gotten a straight answer as to why - esp. confusing because the first quals looked very good.

New comment by ci5er in "Show HN: Convier.me – A Calendar Service for Developers"

ci5er — Sat, 09 Jan 2021 14:12:25 +0000

While I believe that most (?) of Europe uses DD/MM/YYYY, I am pretty sure that most of South East Asia (dunno about India and Nepal) use YYYY/MM/DD.

New comment by ci5er in "New quantum algorithms finally crack nonlinear equations"

ci5er — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 20:14:43 +0000

That's an extraordinary (and unsupported, here) claim.

New comment by ci5er in "Why Clojure? (2018)"

ci5er — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 23:10:54 +0000

> I don't see a future for Scala.

Yeah. It was pretty clumsy before it got less clumsy - and it makes me sad because a lot of the graph-based databased technologies glomed onto it pretty early on - and I mostly like where they say they are going. And their base compile Suxxor and they messed up their community with the new compile Python3 style.

I guess Kotlin is cool and clean - which is good. And has no ecosystem - which is bad. But stapling JVM language together for ad-hoc purposes is what we have learned how to do, neh?

For my part, I'm probably going to go back to high performance renderers and embedded systems. Like the man said bad in the day: "You can all go to hell - I am going to Texas". (Unfortunately I have been there for 30 years since I learned that I hate it.

New comment by ci5er in "State machines are wonderful tools"

ci5er — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 18:35:13 +0000

A long time ago I used to auto gen http and smtp servers and message queues (similar to RabbitMQ) from very compact descriptions. My in-house I infrastructure build-out productivity went up ~30x, but all the downstream teams hated it.