andywood

I got my last 2 jobs simply by updating my LinkedIn, and having recruiters contact me. Both were high-paying, high-profile, really painfully awful jobs. I'll be looking out for ways of getting actually good jobs, assuming such a thing exists.

During times when I lack rewarding work and relationships, I get diagnosed with clinical depression. During times when I have those things, I feel great. I don't think everybody will ever agree on the distinction.

I love programming in general, but I've struggled through my last few jobs. I'm pretty close to hating my current job, despite that fact that I work on a well-known product with millions of users.

The analogy that comes to mind is a pro race car driver who is forced to only drive on an obstacle course, never exceeding 20 mph. The driver has skills that enable him to drive successfully on the obstacle course, but he yearns to do what he loves, opening up on a proper racetrack. In the same way, I have the skills to do tedious debugging of a large, absurdly complex system with tons of technical debt, only making minimal changes to avoid the whole pile of spaghetti collapsing. But I wish every day that I was designing and implementing systems instead, and I'm good at that, too.

Ironically, it was early in my career that I had the most autonomy to implement new features and write a lot of code, even if it was on obscure products. In the latter part of my career, I guess my mistake was allowing myself to be lured into working on "famous" things at big companies, even though it amounted to being mostly a maintenance programmer on sprawling, spaghettified legacy software.

I guess that next time, I should be more diligent about trying to find out what the day-to-day work will be like (which I find very hard to get an accurate idea of in the interview process. obviously the interviewer is going to paint a rosy picture), and at this point I would rather work on something totally obscure, if it meant I got to do more design and coding.

I've never worked in the valley, and I usually don't have much to do with the web or mobile. I don't have a degree, and the subject has literally never once come up in an interview. In 17 years, I've never encountered anyone who cares. Also, the vast majority of job descriptions read something like "Degree in CS OR equivalent experience" and therefore explicitly do not require degrees.

I can never understand how Jupiter can be thought to have any significant effect on the fate of Earth, given how tiny it is compared to the solar system, or even just to its own orbit.

Professionals do in fact date coworkers. It happens all the time - it's a matter of culture. Spend some time at Microsoft, for example. "Microsoft Married" is in the corporate slang lexicon on the intranet.

I've had to use Safari lately because Hulu simply won't work in Chrome. I've also found that some sites that are unusably slow in Chrome scroll like a dream in Safari. It's too bad, because I prefer Chrome's UI. YMMV.

It's not a matter of truth, just convention. "Software Engineer" is a title used in many organizations - not a subtype of engineer. It means programmer. Trying to apply arbitrary qualifications after the fact to make it more "engineer-like" is misguided. Some of us are called Architect even though we don't design buildings or use CAD software to design our products.

Some comments here suggest the possibility of making manual changes to the Rust code. After cross compiling, how does one make changes to the Rust code, then go back and make changes to the Python code, and cross compile again without losing the customized Rust code?

IMO there is an enormous difference. I've always defined hatred in terms like "motivated to kill, for real." Less serious is anger. Far less serious is mischief, which is where I feel most trolling sits.

Put another way, if a person is being irritating (in text, at that), and you find yourself feeling terrorized, there's a massive failure of communication occurring.

I have to agree with you. It's never registered as a problem for me. I think of it like an ordinary kitchen knife. Yeah there's an off chance I might cut myself, but 99% of the time I'm just going to enjoy a steak.

Seems there's nothing specific in the article about which which changes to DX are supposed to enable CGI quality, or how. Is it more polys/sec for smoother models and more geometry? Maybe a more efficient shared memory architecture for GI (I'm speculating. Maybe dreaming)? We're always being promised cinema quality in games, and while we're really not all that far off from it already, we're still quite a bit behind in lighting/rendering.

As a whole, I think the article finally provides a fair amount of specificness, but I was initially struck by how much space is devoted up front to "he-said she-said". It reminded me of celebrity gossip, sportscasting, and punditry.

I've seen countless instances where an anecdote is perfectly reasonable and interesting by itself, yet the anecdote itself is denigrated or at least devalued. [1] I don't like it. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to have research at arms length in the general case.

1. I say this anecdotally, of course.

Your comment is worthless without at least one footnote with a link to a published study.

Or in summary:

1. Our ways > your ways.

2. Nuh uh.

3. (Optional) Wanna fight about it?

Iterate!

(HN version of #2: "Hyperlinks to statistically rigorous peer reviewed studies or GTFO")

I'd say it depends on context. Historically, voxels have been analogous to pixels. This has been somewhat blurred by Minecraft, and the widespread reporting on and discussion of it.

At first, the cubes in Minecraft are analogous to tiles (as in the tiled backgrounds or maps of 2D games), but when you use them to build models and things, then they become like large voxels.

That's my only point: that there's correlation between his condition, and his rants, therefore we don't say, "That guy?? He 'espouses racist ideology'!!* Screw 'im!"

* (actual comment in this thread)

To anyone brandishing the word 'racist' here, can you point us to any instance where what Terry wrote was not merely a rambling screed with the n-word in it, but actually racist thought. Because to me, those are different things - the former likely an excusable symptom, and the latter, y'know, actual racism.

Maybe you think it's the same. Maybe you're enforcing your zero-tolerance policy. If so, we disagree. To me it looks like a huge assumption, possibly more offensive than Terry's rants.

I think the human mind is over-willing to get lost in dreams. Normal consciousness itself is sort of patchwork and fuzzy. I find it very easy to get lost to the point of immersion already in WoW and Minecraft on a medium-sized screen - heck, in a novel, or a daydream. So, I think our native hardware would help it work, if anything.

I think most of us have known "real" VR is inevitable ever since the idea clicked, round about 1990 or so. So far it's lacked the urgency that could have made it a "moon landing"- level quest. Maybe it lacks a killer app.

I think what Palmer has done is organize a vote, where the verdict was, "Yeah, we want it now. Let us find our own killer apps." Whatever, we now have Carmack, Patron Saint of end-to-end Latency, and Samsung, kind of working together-ish in as concerted an effort as there's ever been to make VR work.

Oculus is bound to seem stone-aged even 15 years out, but it's a strong start.

From the article: one thing that stood out that I haven't thought much about is the potential to use VR to achieve altered states (other than the standard immersion and nausea).

I have quit jobs due to burnout and said it was something else, too.

What's happening now?

We all carry cel phones that are also personal computers, MP3 players, and gaming machines. They're made by Apple, Microsoft, and Google (which started as a search engine, like Lycos. Kurzweil and Berners-Lee work there now.) Apple's and Google's run 'nix. Apple's and Microsoft's are pretty hi-fi miniatures of their respective flagship OSes - in fact, in Microsoft's case, things flipped upside down and the phone UI design started driving the desktop.

TL;DR: Pocket PCs. Unix, Linux, "Windows"

Don't panic. The page is titled "Essential...", but unless you're beginning a new AAA engine by yourself, much of this laundry list is more like "Interesting"

I see. I was thinking generally about tools / libs / ecosystem, and platform presence. I actually didn't realize Haskell was already so established.

Now, as a follow-up: is anything holding back Rust?

A lot of times people like the idea of a thing more than the thing.

Meanwhile, a lot a people hate on C++, which they're only able to do because they learned its nuanced spec, which they only did because it had already reached critical mass in the wild, because it worked everywhere and was, despite the complaints, comprehensible, if hard to get perfect in the language-lawyer way.

I don't think TVs were ever really a luxury in the US, except in contrived Internet arguments about the lifestyles of 10th century kings, where they absolutely always were.

Microsoft has an informal but firm no meetings before 11 pseudo-policy. All the white boards you can eat. General freedom to come and go and work when you want, most of the time. YMMV.

And who doesn't love browsing property tax records to see how rich people are?