Hacker News Reader

AndrewMoffaton Fanbois treat criticism of favorite brands as threat to self-image

If it was true, it would be incredible dedication. Lots of people want them dead. To put your life (and your kids' lives!) on the line like that for either cause (legitimate bigotry or reverse shill) is insane regardless

AndrewMoffaton WebGL Water Simulation

this is the algorithm that governs the surface waves. it's remarkably simple and well suited to the parallel computing that shaders can offer: http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/graphics/x_water.htm

AndrewMoffaton WebGL Water Simulation

that's just the initial surface disturbance. it starts at the center of where the sphere breaches the water and has an amplitude. the disturbance radiates outward from that center, but there's no "sticking" to other meshes happening

AndrewMoffaton WebGL Path Tracing

The OpenGL orange book has helped me tremendously http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HMJYC4/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...

AndrewMoffaton Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

from what i understand, the voxels more or less dynamically adjust their resolution according to their distance from the modelview origin (where the player is). if the engine generated dynamic shadow maps per light source, would'nt the voxels need to be high resolution with respect to each light source, so that the shadow map isn't a bunch of huge blocks? i imagine that alone would be a pretty big performance hit

AndrewMoffaton Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

It sounds like he's railing against the motivations of the business as a whole that allow Google, Twitter, and Facebook to live at the scale that they do.

As for why someone would have hostility, I can relate with him. I think it's a general opposition to consumerism needing to be in your face everywhere and the deceptive nature of it (tracking users across the web for example). Just feels "dirty."

AndrewMoffaton [dead]

Here's a picture of Utoya Island http://i.imgur.com/SnFbQ.jpg

I guess it makes sense how he was able to kill so many people...no way to escape or for police to arrive quickly.

AndrewMoffaton [dead]

I don't mean this in a sick or offensive way, but 80, that's got to be a lone-gunman record.

AndrewMoffaton Monkeys Don't Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos

I can only hope these instances get more and more ridiculous, with higher profile people, until something finally gives.

AndrewMoffaton Interview with key LulzSec hacker

I'm kind of shocked at the lack of over-inflated ego.

AndrewMoffaton Complex numbers have never been so intuitive to me

No problem, I'm happy to share something that genuinely helped me. I love what you're doing, please keep doing it :)

AndrewMoffaton Complex numbers have never been so intuitive to me

> though i have looked at euler's identity with awe, it's mostly been a mystical sort of awe.

betterexplained also has a fantastic visual explanation of euler's identity: http://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-understanding-...

AndrewMoffaton Startup Fitness: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Working Out

> Moving sucks if you're carrying an extra 50-100 lbs. around. Most skinny people don't really get this.

I was always a skinny guy most of my life. 4 months ago, I was 5'11", 140lbs, really lean. I recently got serious about weight training and bulking up, lots of high calorie/carbs/fats/proteins, and I'm now up to 177lbs. I'm not exactly fat, but that extra weight is killer. All of my movements are slower, walking up stairs gets me out of breath. I never really understood how much extra weight affects people until now.

AndrewMoffaton Conrad Wolfram: What is wrong with our math education (and how to fix it)

> Just as you don't really understand how a CPU works until you've programmed in assembly, you don't really understand math if you haven't done hand-computation, at least up to a point.

Conrad Wolfram addresses this very point in the video (11:30). He says that the most valid point that hand-calculating helps understanding is that teaching processes themselves helps understanding, but that there's a better way to do that: programming. In other words, programming a math solution is better for teaching math understanding that hand solving it.

In the end, I think the idea he's trying to impart is that the core of math is not calculation at all, it just seems that way because they've been intertwined for so long. But now that we have computers to do the tedious calculations, we can work on defining and exploring what math really is: how different conceptual intuitions are related

AndrewMoffaton Fair use isn’t much good if you can’t afford it

I absolutely agree, but I think that the creative part of photography comes from having "the eye" for knowing what a good photo will be, before it's taken. The photo would not have existed to be as good if the photographer did not apply his creative insight in capturing the photo.

But in my opinion, for photographers to dictate the terms of their photos' usage is nothing but hiding behind the status quo (the current copyright laws) to stroke their own egos. They don't want anyone else to be mistaken for as the "creator" of the photo, because that is just too damaging to their ego. They can't just capture an image for people to enjoy (by seeing, or by remixing, or whatever), they have to make sure their name is attached to it and in people's faces for all eternity.

It's really childish, but it's human behavior. We evolved in a world of finite resources where ownership of and the ability to defend those finite resources meant survival and status. Now we have this new medium where we can create resources and duplicate them nearly infinitely, but we're still hard-wired to try to control every one of those infinite copies, because they're MINEMINEMINEMINE. But we obviously can't watch what everyone is doing, so we just mercilessly beat down anyone who looks like they're getting any attention from using a copy.

Sorry for the wall of text, as a digital artist I feel pretty passionate about the subject.

AndrewMoffaton Fair use isn’t much good if you can’t afford it

Twitter isn't really amplifying it, people are. It's the dynamics of an angry mob. Twitter just facilitates communication that's closer to a group of people in real-time than previously possible.

AndrewMoffaton System for generic, decentralized, unstoppable Internet anonymity

I like the idea, but I won't use it, because I don't think "enough" people will use it.

AndrewMoffaton Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain emulation by 2024

> I don't believe that hell exists now, but it would certainly be possible to create a technological hell if brain uploading and simulation is possible.

Bostom's simulation argument says we're almost certainly living in a computer simulation. This opens up the doors right now for posibilities like "hell." Life after death (with memories, etc) becomes possible...all kinds of things. Scary, really.

AndrewMoffaton The senators who say linking to certain sites should be a felony

The fact that these legislators don't see those immediately-relevant cases you mentioned as being enough gray area to put doubt in their mind as to the effectiveness of the legislation really doesn't speak well to their comprehension of how the internet works. It's really sad.

AndrewMoffaton Find Out if You’re a Target in the Biggest U.S. BitTorrent Lawsuit Ever

The top 10 torrents for movie The Expendables on thepiratebay.org still have a total of 4595 seeders, 500 leechers. Healthy numbers, I wonder if they'll drop dramatically over the next couple of weeks.

AndrewMoffaton Google Chrome Hacked?

On an exploit like this, I expect a patch. I'm sure people at Google and abroad (if the exploit exists in Chromium) are scrambling to find it, both for the e-cred and just to make other people safer.

AndrewMoffaton Out of Osama's Death, A Fake Quotation is Born

I had no idea there was so much work on the subject. Thanks!

AndrewMoffaton Out of Osama's Death, A Fake Quotation is Born

These things are fascinating to me. They're like mind-viruses...hacking our belief systems so effectively that they spread with amazing speed and ease, and persist with incredible resilience.

AndrewMoffaton Sequoia Leads $4.7 Million Investment in Humble Bundle (YC W11)

Unrelated to the story, but interesting:

According to a counter on its website, Humble Bundle has generated over $730,000 in sales on 147,000 bundles ($4.96 per bundle). Linux users pay the most at $11.72 per bundle, Mac users are in the middle at $6.31 and Windows users bring up the rear at $3.95.

Linux users clearly want games. I dropped $10 myself for the Frozenbyte bundle.

AndrewMoffaton Michigan Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops

What laws govern police asking for things?

From what I've gathered, police can ask for all kinds of things that they legally have no right to (searches, being let in, etc), but you can still ignorantly comply. They can even legally lie about shit to persuade you.

AndrewMoffaton Online Cash Bitcoin could Challenge Governments, Banks

There's some great discussions going on in the Economics section of their forums: http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?board=7.0

AndrewMoffaton Online Cash Bitcoin could Challenge Governments, Banks

Why is Bitcoin a good currency again? If I understand how it is distributed correctly, those with higher/more computational power receive more of the finite bitcoins. How does that not favor the already rich?

AndrewMoffaton A virtual pet that helps you raise your TDD practice.

Programming has jumped the shark.

AndrewMoffaton Color

I'm interested in the exploits that may target this. First thing I would want to do is create a way to spoof my location in real-time and see what's going on in that place right then.

Then I would want to send everyone in that area a picture of goatse.

AndrewMoffaton OpenCL University Kit (lectures from AMD)

http://s3.amazonaws.com/opencl_download/opencl_univ_kit_1.0....