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newzombieon Ask HN: What change in your programming technique has been most transformative?

A surprising one is to avoid all kind of jumps (early return, breaks and continues).

A broader one: writing expressions as much as possible. Basically, it means avoiding unnecessary mutations (and jumps).

Then avoiding architecture. Thinking algorithms that process data (instead of "systems") has been transformative.

newzombieon Show HN: Write a private diary using good old email

An idea would be to open source it and make it simple to run an instance.

newzombieon Why we've never fallen in love with virtual reality

The very main reason VR isn't taking off is because it has no killer app, that is, an app that other platforms can't have, and that people love. End-of-story.

What's to understand here is that it's not said that this killer app "exists". If VR is only a cooler screen, then it will sell like cooler screens. Now maybe it's a killer screen, that is a screen that everybody wants. I guess there is a competitive advantage of thinking like that, but right now, vendors think they are making a software/hardware platform when they have no killer app.

newzombieon Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code

This is the kind of 3d engines I was making as a teen. The way it works is that you iterate over x screen-space, get a "ray"/"slice", then you iterate over z camera-space (goes inward) using that ray. From there, you have what it takes to sample a heightmap. Draw a vertical line. There is plenty of room for optimizations and it's very good for learning to code.

newzombieon Ask HN: How to improve code quality while maintaining decent velocity?

Are there any good ideas to improve one's coding / design skills significantly ?

There might be in the CRs you're mentionning. In other words, my advice would be to get the most out of those CRs as you can. Ask questions, encourage people to be critic with you, understand their point of view and learn. If you CR is rejected, get to the core of why it happened technically.

newzombieon Show HN: AI Dungeon 2 – AI-generated text adventure built with 1.5B param GPT-2

Can't play the game, it's like down, please help.

newzombieon Tardigrades may now be living on Moon

If we find one on the moon, can we know if it originates from earth?