Hacker News: q_andrew

New comment by q_andrew in "NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead"

q_andrew — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:20:48 +0000

The powers that be are the US federal government. Their credit card is extremely large, but that money is going towards wars and weapons.

New comment by q_andrew in "NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead"

q_andrew — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:51:13 +0000

Because the powers that be would have deemed a real plan as too expensive.

New comment by q_andrew in "NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead"

q_andrew — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:49:49 +0000

I guess I should clarify, I meant 0.5% to NASA in general. Right now it's 0.33%. In 2002 it was 0.72%.

New comment by q_andrew in "NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead"

q_andrew — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:45:20 +0000

This is so disappointing. The closest thing we ever discovered to life on other planets and the US won't even put 0.5% of budget towards retrieving it.

New comment by q_andrew in "Subway Builder: A realistic subway simulation game"

q_andrew — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 20:00:16 +0000

Note to the dev - FYI one of Steam's terms is that your game can't be sold cheaper somewhere else. Not sure if they enforce that though.

New comment by q_andrew in "Small Town America vs. Big Box Stores"

q_andrew — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 16:53:27 +0000

You're right - what I should have said is that a local store owner is getting the direct profits of their labor. I admit that one of the short-term benefits of a big box store coming to town is that their lowest paid employees get more protections. This comes at the cost of being held at arms length from the actual power structure of the company and makes the dollar general's business practices more unsustainable.

New comment by q_andrew in "Small Town America vs. Big Box Stores"

q_andrew — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:28:25 +0000

Dollar General is a mega corporation that can operate on an entirely different level than local stores. They pay their workers less and the profits go out of state. On a store-by-store basis though, Dollar general is a fragile establishment, management will not hesitate to abandon the location if they are spending too much money propping up the store. And the overhead for these stores is higher than it needs to be - they build way larger stores and parking lots than they actually need. The local dry goods store has grown only to the size that it requires, and those profits go towards its own survival. It provides cultural value, economic opportunities, and is more likely to improve the lives of people living nearby.

Strong towns (who made the article) is a grassroots nonprofit that finds concrete ways for US cities to curb the effects of urban sprawl. One of those ways is to acknowledge that inviting huge commercial ventures into your small local economy is like bringing a giant mammal to roam free on a small island nation. It's probably going to affect the ecosystem in ways that don't suit the environment.

New comment by q_andrew in "James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise"

q_andrew — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 20:50:53 +0000

This is actually why rotational math is more complicated in 3d than you would expect. It's something game developers get used to, because accessing and modifying a rotation requires knowing what the orientation is relative to a fourth axis. That's what a quaternion is. In the situation of this story, it's in reference to the milky way's vertical axis.

New comment by q_andrew in "Logitech F710 gamepad, allegedly contributed to Titan submersible implosion"

q_andrew — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 21:17:44 +0000

Something I noticed in the lawsuit (complaint 5.12) I haven't heard mentioned about this story:

Other than TITAN, no commercial manned submersible has ever suffered an implosion (only early military submarines have done so).

That's a pretty damning statement if true. As a land-dweller, I thought implosion was the main concern when using new submarines.

New comment by q_andrew in "Optimising the Fun Out of Video Games (2018)"

q_andrew — Tue, 14 May 2024 16:42:57 +0000

Economists would probably get a lot of enjoyment from reading about what game designers do, incentive is such a big factor for a successful game.

New comment by q_andrew in "F3D is an open source 3D viewer, fast and minimalist"

q_andrew — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 01:53:55 +0000

Model viewer is a nice tool! I was paid to make some assets for a model viewer website, but I couldn't get any of my model's colors to show correctly. Once I realized that AO was used as direct exposure value, it was smooth sailing ahead.

Most of the time I can't control what light my models are shown in, so it was great to have some control of how it was presented.

Backflip [video]

q_andrew — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 14:27:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zUJzzRu-xs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37704799

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by q_andrew in "Ask HN: Tech that seems to have vanished?"

q_andrew — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 02:16:23 +0000

My guess is that their dubious disposability works against them. You can get self-heated coffee and ramen in a lot of Japanese vending machines, which makes sense because Japan is the capital of non-biodegradable disposables.

New comment by q_andrew in "Show HN: Real-Time 3D Gaussian Splatting in WebGL"

q_andrew — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 02:03:41 +0000

Can't wait to pull this up on my desktop tomorrow.

New comment by q_andrew in "Procreate Dreams"

q_andrew — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 17:18:51 +0000

I was hoping their big announcement was going to be Procreate for PC, but I'm happy for all the people out there who will benefit from better accessible tools.

New comment by q_andrew in "Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction"

q_andrew — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 22:18:15 +0000

Pretty amazing results. It would be fun to work as a traveling 3D capture artist, going to novel locations and scanning assets to use in fantasy worlds.

New comment by q_andrew in "The Carrot Problem"

q_andrew — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 16:08:28 +0000

As someone who went into a STEM field without any family connections to STEM, I have definitely been stuck eating carrots and not knowing why it didn't work.

Interestingly, the human brain tells itself carrot stories all the time:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-prospect/...

tldr: patients with split brain hemispheres will reflexively make up explanations for decisions made by the other half of their brains. Fascinating stuff, and makes me wonder how many things I've done that serve my subconscious' ulterior motives.

New comment by q_andrew in "Magic123: One Image to High-Quality 3D Object Generation"

q_andrew — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 23:23:34 +0000

Certainly a step above what a normal person could do in a 3D modeling program. The interesting thing about this type of stuff is that it would be harder for a professional to use those meshes as a base model; the topology doesn't lend itself to their process. For example -- the banana peels are puffy and two-dimensional. It would have to be completely restructured to be a convincingly peeled banana. So either the generated model has to be a finished product, or they are cost-effectively useless. CAD files are notoriously bad, and those are nice and mathematically easy to break down.

New comment by q_andrew in "Godot 4.1"

q_andrew — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 02:17:17 +0000

Material Maker is surprisingly alone in the PBR material department for FOSS, I have started thinking about diving into the PRs just to get it up to snuff with Substance. I can hardly pay for Photoshop, Adobe!

New comment by q_andrew in "Making Games"

q_andrew — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 19:23:23 +0000

Hi Evan, I enjoyed this blog post a lot. I released my first indie game this February, after working on it since graduating college. It has made 3x my normal job's salary -- I'm still torn about whether to make a sequel and go full time, or stick with my usual 9 to 5. Let me know if you have any good tips!

I think gamedev was also a very big escape for me since middle school, and your post reminded me a lot of those dark times.

I also agree that games are an art, I went from drawing -> modeling -> rendering -> programming, so it was easier for me to reach those conclusions.

Making a game to show off your cleverness is definitely not the best motivation, but I have found that it can improve the game's "experience" if you can harness that feeling. Straddling the line between personal interest, feasibility, and market value is maybe the most important thing to get right as a solo developer in my opinion. I could see developers who got lucky with their obsessions getting absolutely devastated with their lack of hits afterwards (something I'm afraid of doing myself!).

The comment about the twitter gamedev scene being driven by terminally online people is very accurate, although I still admire some of the more educational/resource oriented ones for their sheer willpower.