dkhar

I remember when that whole snafu was on the HN front page! :)

(This isn't the exact link I remember seeing, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3666564 )

If you want knowledge from the same pool Ritter's drawing from, check out this blog post[1] about fr-041: Debris by ryg. Now, keep in mind, Ritter didn't do work on Debris as far as I know, but he's spent a lot of time with the people who did, and some of the ideas in NOWHERE have their origin in that scene (a lot of it is totes original, but you're asking about procedural generation, and procedural generation is definitely a demoscene thing).

Before game dev, Ritter was known as a musician and a demoscener (if you don't know what the demoscene is, do some googling -- it's deffo worth it). The demoscene group he was part of broke exciting new ground in the mid 2000s by releasing some productions that packed ridiculous amounts of content into a very small size by procedurally generating lots of things, like textures and geometry. The greatest of these demos is called Debris[2], and some consider it the best demo ever. Ryg's article is basically a big index of articles explaining how parts of Debris were written, as well as how they work.

[1] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/debris-opening-the-...

[2] Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxfmxi-boyo

and keep in mind that everything you're seeing was rendered in real time by a single executable 177kb in size.

[3?] Also worth looking at: http://www.iquilezles.org/www/index.htm

On the subject of interesting magnetic effects, a lot of people don't know that pretty much all matter is magnetic, just that the strength of the interaction is a lot smaller than what we're used to with ferromagnets.

All materials exhibit a diamagnetic (pushes against the field) effect, but in many materials, that effect is overwhelmed by a competing paramagnetic (pushes in the direction of the field) effect. Most of the things we call "magnets" exhibit ferromagnetism, which typically produces much stronger forces than either of the previous two.

H2O is particularly interesting, because it's actually diamagnetic, and will push away from magnetic fields. Given a strong enough magnet, you can have a lot of fun with this effect by putting common water-filled objects in its field: http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/

Sound intensity actually falls off as 1/r², and here's a source:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/acoustic/invsqs.h...

In my experience, the Thai restaurants around me (East coast US) like to make their sauces very oil/butter heavy, which contributes to the second phenomenon you alluded to. I've never been to Thailand, so I don't know if this is an exclusively American phenomenon or not.

I personally really like a good Lat na, but what I'm served is often noodles in a thick, chicken flavored grease (rather than stock or gravy).

It's the registry, not Docker itself.

This analogy might help: Docker Registry is to Docker as Github is to Git.

I have a friend who used to keep excitedly showing me his crazy, impressive redstone ALU/CPU designs. I kept trying to get him to buy an FPGA and build out something with real hardware, but he maintained that a big part of why it was fun was because of the environment and community that came with Minecraft. That might go some way toward providing an explanation.

This is a good opportunity to plug ORE, a Minecraft community specifically for this kind of thing:

http://openredstone.org/

That video on their main page is mind-boggling to me.

I have a friend who's a regular on that server, and he would occasionally explain to me things like how they take advantage of how Minecraft's redstone handling works to shave precious ticks off the latest ALU design's return time, or how they created a fully vanilla-compatible "internet," to pass data through wires between different people's machines.

They've got mods set up to copy and paste blocks, so you can build modular systems out of components and avoid repetitive block-placing, but AFAIK, everything else is vanilla. It's incredible.

Well, some classic "high school English literature class" books that fulfill that criteria are Miller's Death of a Salesman and Wharton's Ethan Frome.

Still in the Western classical canon, Puccini's Madame Butterfly is fantastic, if you're into opera.

It looks like that's the case -- none of the example images on the front page work for me.

DeepFace's figures[1] also come from running it on the LFW dataset[2]. While Facebook's production tech will be more accurate because of what you say, the Deepface algorithm has a lot of raw power, too!

[1] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ranzato/publications/taigman_cvpr...

[2] http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/index.html

That was an interesting article/book summary. The main idea (that there exists a correlation artistic creativity and mood disorders) is something I've observed anecdotally.

I get the impression, however, that it serves the end of history and entertainment more than it does those of science. The examples in the article were light on sample sizes and heavy on speculation ("Is mental illness caused by creativity? Maybe it's the other way around! Who knows?"). I wonder if the book it's about offers more solid corroborating sources.

Actually, your timing is really fortuitous: Just yesterday, the aforementioned Farbrausch member/NOWHERE developer posted a progress report[1] for the game. Somewhere near the end, he mentions that they had to delay the game's Steam Early Access release to finish a few things, that they had factored the release into this month's revenues, and that they are now borrowing money to pay the rent on their home (the developer and artist are married).

Please check the game out and do consider supporting Paniq (apparently Patreon[2] is the most convenient way to do this). There really could be no better time for a small bit of exposure!

[1] http://blog.duangle.com/2014/07/nowhere-progress-report-its-...

[2] http://www.patreon.com/duangle

You know what they say: ASD -- Amusic's Soundtrack Dump

(That said, I'm actually part of the faction who likes aMusic's weird prog-rocky compositions. And, regardless of what you think of his work, you've got to respect aMusic for being one of the very few demoscene composers who incorporate real, acoustic instruments and vocals into their work. I really can't think of any others.)

For a point of contrast:

I attend the College of William and Mary in Virginia. In 2009, the College dropped its speech codes and became one of the most free-speech-friendly schools in the US. This has its ups and downs (in my opinion, mostly ups).

We have a fairly diverse studentry, but I haven't seen that many people with incredibly strong opinions. Most people (myself included) don't really regularly say or do things that would fall under PC speech codes. That said, I do know a few activist types, and they relish the freedom they have at the College. I've known people who go to DC to participate in protests on the weekends, people who write articles on why the "government has failed its mandate to protect our right to privacy" or "how the liberal media uses misleading language to paint climate change as something that's actually happening" (obviously different people). We've got EFF activists, marijuana legalization activists, sexual health activists, hard-line family-values conservatives -- basically, what should be the regular college gamut. It's a shame that appears to be contingent on a free-speech policy that is relatively extreme.

Free speech also has its downsides. Earlier this year, we made state and national news when a fraternity member distributed this extremely misogynistic letter, that various headlines describe as "The most hideous thing I've ever read"[1] and "vomit-inducing"[2]. We drew censures from practically everyone, and many people I talked to around that time wanted the College to boot the offending fraternity. The College, of course, did no such thing, and the fraternity voluntarily suspended operations (there could have been some under-the-table coercion there, but I doubt it).

Anyway, the point is, if colleges allow free speech, they must also stand by while some vile, vile things get published. All communities result in emergent standards of discourse and systems of self-governance when those standards are violated (after all, the backlash from that letter was strongest in the student community), and these systems dull the effects of those vile things, but they affect the community regardless. I personally think the benefits outweigh the costs.

[1] http://www.bustle.com/articles/14437-sigma-chi-frat-brothers...

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/fraternity-brother-...

Yup! Est. 1995! Here's a Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_(game)

I remember playing a version of this game that was posted on HN a few weeks ago. Jennifer Dewalt (the person who learned to code by making a website every day for 180 days) made it! http://jenniferdewalt.com/lights_on/game

The mathematics behind this game are apparently pretty interesting. I'm not big on matrix math, but I bet a lot of you guys are.

Well, I started working at a place where I was regularly juggling 2-4 SSH sessions, 2 programs running and dumping logs in other tabs, plus a few more open terminals, and after a coworker introduced me to the wonderful zsh[1], I wondered what other great tools I was missing. That's what led me to iTerm2.

I stuck with iTerm because of the many, many little features and conveniences that make working with the terminal easier.

Tabs can be put at the bottom of the screen, which solves that pesky issue where changing tabs on a fullscreened terminal.app causes the OSX topbar to slide down and intercept your click. Tab titles change color depending on the kind of activity that's going on within. Hotkey mapping is a lot more powerful, and lets you send arbitrary hex/escape codes with hotkeys. There's a drop-down mode, like Tilda or Visor. This might just be placebo, but I'm pretty sure it also glitches out less often than Terminal.app.

All in all, everything is just a little bit nicer than the stock terminal.

[1] officially http://zsh.sourceforge.net/, but you want http://ohmyz.sh/

> ...Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources.

The argument I'd make for "why?" is that Wikipedia is more accessible and more reliably available than most other resources. I mean, if the government of the Philippines had a web-based, up-to-date list of towns with some basic information, it might make sense to offload the effort of maintaining that information to them. As it stands, though, not even the US has such a directory -- so Wikipedia picks up the slack (or at least it does for towns in the US).

I'm not very in-tune with Wikipedia's culture (which, I've read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don't see why this is a bad thing, given the information in the articles is accurate (and the article gives the impression that glitches are rare).

If nobody else was going to create an article about some species of butterfly, I don't see why adding that information would be harmful to Wikipedia. Does it make Wikipedia harder to read? Harder to search?

I don't think "it's not written by a human" is a valid argument for factual information, and I've never seen any evidence to suggest that it should be one.

EDIT: I found this bot's edit log! https://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Logg/Lsjb...

Here are a few articles randomly picked out of the latest 1000:

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urochloa_plantaginea

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachiaria_vittata

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andropogon_decipiens

After looking at these, I'm beginning to see why there is some backlash. There are literally thousands of articles here that read "X is a species of grass. It got its name from Y and is described in Z catalog." The only people who would need this information are botanists, and they already have their own specialized sources. I'm still not against bot-produced content, but I understand why some people oppose initiatives like this.

[1] http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

I feel like Minecraft came close. Interestingly enough, Minecraft has similar features to a lot of MUDs (focus on player-defined and player-modified environments, lack of focus on graphics, fantasy tropes, some programmability, a game centered around navigation).

Man, saurik, you need a vacation. You need to not have to think about Cydia, or the community, or maybe even computers at all for at least a week or so.

You're talking about how all of these developments in the community wear on you, and how you view maintaining all this stuff in part as an obligation. I could be reading all this wrong, but I get the impression that dedicating so much of your life to Cydia is going to burn you out eventually, abrasive community or not. You just sound tired.

I feel like letting the project sit for a week or so while you take a break and get away from it all may actually be worth it in the long run. You sure as hell deserve it.

I'm really interested in this stuff, and I did some Googling along these lines. The most useful thing I've found so far is this "Common Data Set" initiative[1] that essentially has colleges fill out a form covering basic summary statistics (e.g. total dollars given in financial aid, number of students admitted, etc). You can look up "common data set [college name here]," and probably find their version of the form.

I'll try and do some more research and maybe analyze some of the CDS data tomorrow. If you find anything interesting, please post it as well!

[1] http://www.commondataset.org/

Well, private colleges are essentially businesses. I'm not sure if the government can mandate them to release information about their... clients?

That said, we don't need super personal data. Summary statistics would be fine.

On that note, the NPR article cites this survey[1], wherein participating private colleges contributed data that was then used to calculate aggregate statistics about students in the US in general.

What we'd want is probably more specific than that. We need per-school statistics, so that trends in how colleges charge and discount may be identified (what if colleges on the East coast are more likely to mark down tuition? What if advertised tuitions are relatively constant, but actual tuition paid varies with cost of living? these are interesting threads to explore). The difference between the average student's tuition after grants and the sticker price, along with the standard deviation of that distribution, would be a good place to start. Quantiles would be even better.

[1] http://www.nacubo.org/Documents/about/pressreleases/2013TDSP...

The main idea of this story is that private colleges are like used cars: They've got a high sticker price that's almost always haggled down "because you're not just any student/customer." The resulting anchoring effect makes people more likely to see private college tuition as a value.

Here's my contribution to the discussion: The article interviews a professor at Wharton (that's part of UPenn, a private college), and one at UMinnesota (a public college) who's advising the college administration to start following the private college model. I did a little snooping, and found out that the author is a Yale graduate. So this is similar to some used car owners (and someone who thinks his dealership should get into used cars) talking about how used car dealerships are deceptive about their pricing.

Edit: I thought a little more about this, and I've decided that this is a pattern caused by information asymmetry. The whole price negotiation game with used car dealerships really stopped being super profitable when the internet made it easy to figure out how much a given vehicle was "supposed to" cost.

I wonder if we could do the same for college tuition...

> Selenium seems very heavy-weight to me

Fair point. Perhaps try Sulfur?

In short, I think the X240 improves incrementally on its predecessors, but the rest of the market has moved fast enough that it's behind the curve now.

Slightly longer:

For $1000 today, I can get a Macbook Air with:

- An SSD

- Twice the battery life (yeah, the X240 has nice removable batteries, but that kind of defeats the point of an ultraportable)

- A higher res screen that's only half an inch bigger

- A far nicer trackpad

- A nicer graphics chipset

I'd be giving up:

- Alloy roll cage and spill protection

- Powerbridge (hot-swappable batteries)

- A touch screen/digitizer (an Intuos2 ($40 from ebay) fills that gap nicely for me)

I don't think the X240 is a bad laptop, but, right now, the costs far outweigh the benefits.

Here are some examples of bibliometrics:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index The big one. Used to judge researchers.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-index Another one for researchers. I haven't really come in contact with this one very much.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I10-index Google's own little algorithm.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor Older. Used to judge journals

The first and last articles have fittingly long "criticism" sections. A key point to make here is that these bibliometrics succeed at their basic goal (providing one platform by which to judge all academics/publications) at the price of misaligning incentives.

Resultantly: you do get to judge all academics on an even platform, but that platform is a weighted average of how well they do research and how well they play the politics/popularity game, scaled by the popularity of their field (good luck finding me a researcher in theoretical plasma physics with an h-index over 30 -- I'm not sure there are even 30 theoretical plasma physicists in the US.).

On top of this, sites like ResearchGate (like LinkedIn, but for researchers) give people their own score, which is pretty opaque, and display it in bright green next to everyone's profile picture. It introduces a lot of competition to a field that doesn't really need it.

Some of the newer Asus Zenbooks have the three criteria you're looking for, but they're very flaky on consistency and reliability (different trackpad hardware on the same laptop at random, screens dying randomly).

I actually have no huge OS preference, but I use a MacBook because it's literally the only thing on the market right now that fulfills those three criteria (I also have a fourth: <5 lbs) and reliably performs for longer than a year.

Lenovo's keeping up to some extent (I loved the X220 and X230, but the X240 is no longer competitive. Like others here have mentioned, the T440s is pretty nice, but the trackpad is clunky), but HP, Dell, Toshiba, Sony, and everyone else seem to have completely forgotten about the business laptop market. What happened, laptop manufacturers?