Hacker News Reader

>It's better to just bury it, as safely as possible, and then remove all outside traces of existence.

Seems quite rude to leave unmarked radioactive waste lying around where future people might stumble over it.

>As horrible as this may sound, the best we can hope for is the radiation will act quickly so those venturing in will provide ample examples to those that didn't.

Oh man so this crazy ancient tomb has this magical force that kills everyone that goes in. I heard the last team made it further than everyone else before it and the last guy stumbled out with all these ancient artifacts!

krisgeeon Ten Thousand Years

>English, largely through conquest and trade, has become the de facto language of technology and science

250 years ago you could have said similar things about French. These things are fleeting at geological timescales.

I'm not really sure we could do anything that would stop humans from trying to bust in and honestly the more elaborate our warnings the more people will want to see what we were trying to hide. I mean consider the (false but useful) Curse of King Tut. Big letters say "Sickness and death will come to all who try to enter this place" what's your first reaction? To try and get in there and see what the ancient people were hiding.

Anyway all this does give some excellent ideas for a sort of D&D-esque game where everyone dies at the end of the dungeon because all the warnings were true and it was just a really old toxic waste dump.

krisgeeon July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)

Well the internet is essentially just a really fast mail horse so there haven't been any improvements in communication for thousands of years!

krisgeeon July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)

>I'd argue we haven't made such large, significant technology leaps in such a short span

In 1999 I used a card catalog at my rural library to get an encyclopedia from 1989.

Just today I used my cell phone to call my friend who is quite literally halfway around the world and had a real time video chat with her. This happened in 14 years.

krisgeeon July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)

We put men on the moon before we invented the digital watch.

krisgeeon July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)

> I wonder if governments could ever stomach the 1960's attitude of "throwing caution to the wind" to send humans to Mars or beyond.

I would honestly hope not because there's no point in doing it wrong, especially not now when any failure is a huge setback and successes are treated as expected.

We will put people on Mars, we will have space stations and people living on the moons of Jupiter. This won't happen quickly and I do understand that at some point we have to put people in danger but there's no reason to do it as recklessly as we did in the 60's.

Hell we're doing just fine as it is. Right now there are six people living in space. There are companies starting right now to supply them, to get minerals from asteroids, to take people to Mars. It's happening now and it's just not as heroic as it was in the 60's, which to my mind just shows that we're doing it right.

krisgeeon July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)

I've really got to speak to the incredible soundtrack that "When we left Earth" has.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzCsDVfPQqk

Probably my favourite scene and if I'm honest though I am not even an American, watching the stars and stripes through the condensation ice and the big red U S A crawling by makes me feel a bit patriotic.

krisgeeon The voodoo of lobster economics

Principle of the thing. I don't buy scallops unless I'm down home because the markup on it seem ridiculous (especially since they're usually less fresh and of lesser quality).

krisgeeon The voodoo of lobster economics

I was honestly sort of surprised people didn't know. The collapse of the fishery was so completely devastating to the east coast (where I was born) economy that it's just sort of a given back home that lobster prices are awful, your potatoes are going to rot and your kids are going to move (like I did).

krisgeeon The voodoo of lobster economics

Yes. 1/3 of your plating price as the wholesale cost of the ingredients is pretty standard.

krisgeeon The voodoo of lobster economics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northw...

Yep. If you were wondering why so many east coasters are in Alberta digging for oil this is why.

krisgeeon The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment

Yeah it's a reference to Ra. Nice catch.

krisgeeon The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment

I'd think if we're in a simulation you should act like Everything Is Real and continue on as you would normally instead of messing up the data set.

edit:

I also occurs to me that if we're being simulated by an AI

a) I don't really care about my super self that much

b) Any AI that is simulating me can, by definition read my mind so it'll know I wasn't serious anyway

c) This AI can also plant thoughts in my head.

At this point there's really no point at all considering anything else because either nothing matters and I have no control over anything anyway or it's reality, I do and I'd do what I do normally.

krisgeeon A “nationwide gentrification effect” is segregating us by education

>with nobody to spy on you

Yeah if you buy what the Minds are selling. (I agree with you and would absolutely live in The Culture, I just felt like playing devil's advocate/discussing the Culture novels).

krisgeeon TSA: Some on US-bound flights must turn on phones

Another on the long list of reasons I don't every fly to, from or through the USA even though it sometimes makes my routes longer and more expensive.

krisgeeon Consciousness on-off switch discovered deep in brain

You can make anything sound daft by expressing it a certain way. The entire history of physics, all the way from cavemen to the LHC, is just a story of smashing rocks together in creative ways and watching what happens.

But obviously it's a lot more than that, and so is electric brain stimulation.

krisgeeon How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen

I'm a native english speaker I'd make the same assumptions about "ba" as you would. I'm not sure what accent "ba" would be pronounced "bay" in.

krisgeeon Arthritis drug spurs hair growth in man with alopecia universalis

Not trying to be a jerk, but why don't you just intentionally shave the rest of your head?

krisgeeon YouTube's Biggest Draw Plays Games, Earns $4 Million a Year

It works, 4 million dollars a year can attest to that. So even though I intensely dislike it I can't really argue against it.

krisgeeon Zelda: The Wind Waker – Tech and Texture Analysis

The tingle tuner was a pile of junk but it did make some very interesting speed running stuff possible.

krisgeeon Zelda: The Wind Waker – Tech and Texture Analysis

http://old.troygilbert.com/2006/10/the-movement-and-attack-m...

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/8336/how-was-coll...

2D Zelda had some neat stuff too.

krisgeeon Zelda: The Wind Waker – Tech and Texture Analysis

I'm almost 100% sure others will disagree but I'd say start with Unity. The most important thing is getting something small done to give you a taste of what's involved and then you can dig deeper and develop Opinions and eventually go pick a new engine/roll your own.

I definitely do not recommend trying to roll your own engine at first because you'll never get a game done.

krisgeeon Zelda: The Wind Waker – Tech and Texture Analysis

Fantastic! I remember reading this a couple of years ago and saying "huh, that's cool" but I make games now and it's much more interesting to read having had to write shaders and make similar sorts of compromises, I especially like the closest source shadows and semi-dynamic tassles on the spears.

On a less technical note it's amazing how going with the cell-shaded look has made the game age so well even the original non-HD gamecube game still looks great today.

krisgeeon With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

>a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe

Yeah but it won't also have several GB of games, audio, apps and photos on it as well. People would cry bloody murder if they found out google was using 7 GB of space to cache the world map by default.

If you are a person who needs a world map at their fingertips there are apps for that but the average person just needs google maps to figure out what turn the should take occasionally.

krisgeeon Why Coders Are Going Nuts Over Apple’s New Programming Language

> With something that Apple calls an “interactive playground,” Swift is even exploring a highly visual kind of programming that may go beyond other mainstream languages

I thought the "interactive playground" was just a REPL, is it something more?

krisgeeon Why Coders Are Going Nuts Over Apple’s New Programming Language

>It's better than Objective-C

This is pretty much the only thing we (programmers) at my work were talking about yesterday. The language itself is pretty neat but not really anything groundbreaking. The fact that you can code iOS without using Objective-C or busting down to the C++ level is really great news though.

krisgeeon A Hacker’s Guide to Git

Merge feature branches to a common dev branch then we branch off QA builds and RCs from there.

krisgeeon I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome

>This is because a lot of time they're just English loan words in disguise in Korean characters.

I was practising my Hangul by reading the signs between Seoul and where I was staying out the bus window. The very first sign I read fully was "Noodle House", it was vaguely disappointing.

krisgeeon Ken Thompson flies a MiG-29 (1999)

That's interesting! I worked at the CSA for awhile as one of my co-op internships and my supervisor would tell stories (mostly horror) about the big purchase of CF-18s and vetting all the code in the flight computer and such.