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mtinkerhess

1,453 karma · joined April 14, 2009

Software Engineer at Meta, formerly Snap, Riot Games, Oculus, 343 Industries, Microsoft Studios
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mtinkerhess··on How to raise a child with taste in eighteenth-century Britain
Or, you know, language shifts over time
mtinkerhess··on Nim 2.0.0 RC2
You don't always get to pick your tools. If you're using GitHub, ctrl+F should find what you're looking for.
mtinkerhess··on This is a Chord (2016)
Jacob Collier is a legit next level musician. He does a lot of overdubbing of himself but he does other styles also. His recordings like Moon River and Flintstones are incredible both in terms of arrangement and performance. In a very different style, his Piano Ballads record is great, Let it Be is great on that one.

Totally understand if none if it is your style!

mtinkerhess··on There’s no speed limit (2009)
If you’re in C major, the V chord is G7, which contains a tritone between its 3 and 7, B and F. You can say, what if instead of B being the 3 of the chord and F being the 7, F is the 3 and B is the 7? Then you discover that the root of this other chord is C# (or Db). Because the function of a chord is largely dictated by the 3 and 7 in it, this means you can substitute any dominant 7 chord with another dominant 7 chord a tritone away and it will still basically function the same (this can create some extra dissonance before the cadence which is nice and it creates some nice chromatic movement in the bass).
mtinkerhess··on Programming in the Apocalypse
I would be more than happy to give up almost everything if it would stop climate change, but unfortunately even if I make all those changes, everybody else will continue driving cars, so it seems my personal choices have nothing to do with whether global warming happens or not. The way around this is collective (government) action to guarantee everyone will participate, but for a variety of reasons we don't have the political will to make that happen. Besides, I'm not convinced individuals' actions are to blame for the majority of climate change -- I'm not an expert but I'm under the impression that corporate / industrial energy usage is the majority of the problem.
mtinkerhess··on GTA 6 Confirmed
Yes, the game industry is incredibly secretive. Any hint of any news from a game studio will make headlines, and studios want to control the marketing narrative, so part of the job is learning to keep those secrets.
mtinkerhess··on We have jetpacks and we do not care
I found the same video it looks like all those dangers are preventable? Don't do acrobatics at low altitude, don't fly over water, don't start the engine on the ground, don't buzz trees or other obstacles, don't get close to other paramotors in flight.
mtinkerhess··on Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?
Vaccination greatly reduces transmission.
mtinkerhess··on Inheritance was invented as a performance hack
A C++ pure abstract class is equivalent to a Java interface.
mtinkerhess··on U.S. senators reintroduce bill to make daylight saving time permanent
Let's take it one step farther, and have each second be 99.999% of a second from December 20 and June 20, and be 100.001% of a second from June 20 to December 20. Problem solved!
mtinkerhess··on Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
"What about..."

There are better solutions.

mtinkerhess··on Murdering the Mayor of Paradise
It's problematic because the article isn't about their ethnicity, and your comment boils down to "hey guys just so you know, they're Jews." Who cares? Unless you're going to tie that back to the story somehow, what's the point of bringing it up? It's not explicitly antisemitic but it is a weird thing to highlight.
mtinkerhess··on Mac DeMarco on Anxiety, Alcoholism and the Mitski controversy
This was submitted by a user that only submits articles from the same site, almost none of which are really on topic for HN. Flagged.
mtinkerhess··on Reddit Protests and China’s Control of American Culture
">>" can be read as "is much greater / larger than"
mtinkerhess··on Advent of Nim
I totally hear you that this is not a huge inconvenience in practice. Part of me is worried that it becomes more and more of a problem the bigger the project gets.

But mostly, it just seems like a really weird call to make for the language. There are real disadvantages to it -- I can't really rely on my search tools. So that... when you're using a library you can refer to its identifiers using a different capitalization convention if you want to--why is that important?

I don't know, it just seems like a really weird call to make, and if that's one of the first things I've learned about the language it makes me think there are probably plenty of other weird things like it.

mtinkerhess··on Advent of Nim
A lot of people are replying saying this isn't a big deal in practice. I believe them but I'll chime in and say this is also a dealbreaker for me.

I would love to find a language for game / engine development that's as performant as C++ and as easy to use as C# or Python, but this issue scares me. If I search for a variable using any of my existing plain text search tools, I expect to find the variable. It makes me think that this isn't a language that's meant to be used by large teams on large, long-lived codebases.

mtinkerhess··on David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architectures and Languages
For a lot of problems performance really isn't the problem. In many, many cases the engineering cost to optimize C++ to get a benefit over Java / C# will be way more expensive than just paying for more servers. Even in game dev where milliseconds matter C# is very common.

Personally I agree about dynamically typed languages not being great for large projects but that's more about maintainability than perf.

mtinkerhess··on 1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond (2001)
It depends on the genre and the specific game. RTSs can do it this way and some fighting games do, although some fighting games use a variation that involves predicting player input and rewinding the game state on misprediction in order to reduce perceived latency. FPSs tend to use a totally different model that involves sending only the most recent relevant information to each player and trying to balance server authoritative cheat-prevention with allowing clients a little leeway in order to make the twitchy gameplay feel better. There's a great paper on Tribes' networking model that is still largely relevant for FPSs.
mtinkerhess··on Utah governor signs law legalizing 'free-range parenting'
Yes it does! FWIW it doesn't come off as patronizing to me, it has connotations with organic / locally grown / health food.
mtinkerhess··on Unreal Engine 4.19 Released
Learn blueprint scripting. It takes a little getting used to but it's essential to being productive in UE4. Once you get the hang of it it's basically another scripting language. You can get a long way without writing any C++, and because it's faster, less error-prone, and has great auto-complete it makes it a lot easier to learn UE4's APIs while working in BP than in C++.

Besides that, read the docs and learn UE's concepts of actors, components, blueprints (prefabs), actor inheritance, pawns, and controllers. Then when you want to add some C++, make C++ base classes for your blueprint classes so you put some functionality in each.

Epic has great docs, this one might be a good place to start if you have Unity experience: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/GettingStarted/FromUnity

mtinkerhess··on All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
Money is a social construct. A person can only earn money because as a society we've decided to create the rules and institutions that allow that to happen. Our current free-market system that assumes money should be accumulated freely and its ownership preserved by default is based on ideology, not physics.

Given the current massive wealth inequality, one really simple, effective, and ethical way to help people who are poor and suffering is to redistribute wealth. We don't do that because our political and cultural systems disproportionately represent the interests of the rich.

It's reasonable to say that as long as there are poor and suffering people, as long as we don't all have access to health care and education, as long as there are causes for the common good, there may be an asymptotic upper limit to the amount of wealth a single person can ethically have, when that wealth could be going toward improving other people's lives instead.

mtinkerhess··on This is the Razer Phone
I have a 14" 1080p Blade at home and another one for work. Overall it's my favorite laptop I've ever owned. I can do game dev, VR dev, and play games on it. It boots up fast. It's solidly built. The keyboard feels good to type on even though the travel is pretty shallow. The trackpad works pretty good. My only real complaint is that the fans can get pretty loud, but if that happens and I'm in a coffee shop I just switch to the power saver power plan and then it quiets down.

I read that quality control was an issue so I bought it from Microsoft's website so if there was a problem I could bring it into a MS store. But I haven't had a problem with it.

mtinkerhess··on Basic Income Research Proposal
As a game developer I'm 100% okay with that!
mtinkerhess··on Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
A few years ago I wrote a proof-of-concept interpreter for a small stack-oriented prefix-notation language inspired by languages like Python, Lisp, io, and GolfScript, written in Python.

I had fun with the project, learned some stuff about interpreters, and also learned that infix notation for things like arithmetic is actually pretty neat and we should probably keep using it.

https://github.com/mtinkerhess/puget

mtinkerhess··on A Visa for founders, engineers and investors willing to join France
Sure, if you plan to never get sick, have kids, or get laid off. Or if you're not trying to settle in one place.
mtinkerhess··on Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs
You have the same as what you have after watching a movie or reading a book.
mtinkerhess··on Mark Zuckerberg's virtual reality demo [video]
Michael Abrash gave a great talk later in the presentation about future directions in VR. He talked about retina tracking in the context of foveated rendering, which he said has a higher accuracy requirement than avatar eye direction. He seemed confident we'll get there.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv_eIRv1Vk4

mtinkerhess··on Clinton Gets $13m from Health Industry, “Single-Payer Will Never, Ever Come”
I recently quit my job to start my own indie game studio. I came dangerously close to being unable to file the paperwork to prove that I was experiencing a "qualifying life event" that would allow me to sign up for ACA insurance outside of the normal once-per-year window. It's not that I was lazy -- I started looking at options over a week before I left my job, and between the various websites being down every night, and insurance representatives not knowing what they're talking about, and having to figure out coverage for my partner also, the whole process was way trickier than it should have been.

A former coworker of mine recently went through the same process when he quit, and ended up without insurance for a short period.

A lapse in insurance coverage means exposure to basically unlimited costs. That's not a position anyone should have to take, whether due to financial hardship or missing a paperwork deadline. And until we get single-payer, there are going to people who fall through the cracks who have to face the possibility of losing their life savings if they get hit by a bus.

mtinkerhess··on State of emergency declared across France after Paris shootings and explosions
Furthermore, the terrorists want to create division between Muslim and non-Muslim / west and middle east. They know what our knee-jerk reactions will be and are hoping we will follow through on them.
mtinkerhess··on [dead]
Not in the EU so I'm not sure what the atmosphere there is, but to me that sounds pretty racist. I bet it's an extraordinarily small percentage of Muslim immigrants who are violently inclined.
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