HN user

ci5er

1,563 karma
Posts1
Comments1,264
View on HN

Heck, my kids are theoretically engineers (at least their degree says so!), but even buying BackBlaze for them, I can't even get them to hit Ctrl-S from time-to-time. I think their mom must have fucked the milkman, because she is smarter than this herself...

Nicely written. For certain.

Would it be cruel to suggest that you might want to advance a bit more before weighng in ?

I'd say that semiconductor physics, real math, control systems, real mixed signal and a couple of others should get a go ... but my eldest child didn't get much past this, so maybe the state of the art today?

Again- I mean no cruelty in my comments, but seems as if modern curricula are not teaching a person what a person needs to know to go into any related industry job...

(And I could be wrong - as I often am)

I pay (personally) for the entire Jetbrains tool set. They are damn good. And I guess to be fair, I haven't given a lot of time to VSCode, but TBH: I find that Sublime and IntelliJ cover the spectrum for me (which is Scala, Java, Kotlin, Python, C, Go and Typescript all with git support)

I'm not super exploratory, because it always seems that I have a project due in two weeks, but given that I have pickd up two of the BEAM languages, but am always lagging on learning Ruby and Haskell. These days - I'm starting to wonder about the utility of learning another language, other than re-learning Smalltalk out of nostalgia.

1977: Zork 5 years ago

Edit- planet fall was also fun - these were a nice mix-up with Sirtech"s Wizardry... "A Kobold"

1977: Zork 5 years ago

How about Hitchhiker's? There were a couple of frustrating bits there. Gosh - I must have played a dozen of those things - and now, being old, I probably couldn't remember what I did, and am probably too stupid to figure it out again. (Or I have other things to do than beat my head against the wall ... or all the above)

There basically no amount of money that it would not have been worth it to spend.

Maybe!

But, while the transmission rate appears to be sort of high - the fatality rate seems to be low (and getting lower as we figure out effective treatment protocols). I guess I personally don't think it was worth killing the economy over it.. Isolate "at risk people" (say over 75-or-so?) In fact, at least in the US - I think the shutdown caused more harm than the disease (although reasonable people often draw different conclusions from the same data...)

Photon mapping. I've never gotten radiosity debugged properly. I tend to like Reyes as something that works for NURB tersellation for me than the triangle interpolation thing. It could be that I'm a lazy programmer that has trouble with textures using classic z-buff techniques.

Well, the algorithm was developed in the 1600's, but I remember Turner Whitted's 1979 SIGGRAPH paper blowing me away. I mean, sure, they were slow, but before REYES, they were about the only solution to GlobIlum. (Forward from the lights and backwards from the camera - you could even do specular lighting!)

What's weird to me is how freaked out people are about this. I get that it is a higher risk than a lightening strike, but given that the absolute number of deaths in 2020 was lower than 2019 (even given that deaths of despair were up significantly), I'm thinking our society has turned into a bunch of nervous nellies. Or maybe city folk don't think they should ever get to die.

In any case, the scared worried self-isolating comments I have read in this thread from "man-folk" make me think that when we got rid of TB and SPox and Polion - we probably got rid of Testosterone at the same time.

What happened with CIGS? There was a privately funded CIGS company here in Austin TX that also didn't make it (even though the founders and investors were solid) and I've not gotten a straight answer as to why - esp. confusing because the first quals looked very good.

I don't see a future for Scala.

Yeah. It was pretty clumsy before it got less clumsy - and it makes me sad because a lot of the graph-based databased technologies glomed onto it pretty early on - and I mostly like where they say they are going. And their base compile Suxxor and they messed up their community with the new compile Python3 style.

I guess Kotlin is cool and clean - which is good. And has no ecosystem - which is bad. But stapling JVM language together for ad-hoc purposes is what we have learned how to do, neh?

For my part, I'm probably going to go back to high performance renderers and embedded systems. Like the man said bad in the day: "You can all go to hell - I am going to Texas". (Unfortunately I have been there for 30 years since I learned that I hate it.

A long time ago I used to auto gen http and smtp servers and message queues (similar to RabbitMQ) from very compact descriptions. My in-house I infrastructure build-out productivity went up ~30x, but all the downstream teams hated it.

Why Jira Sucks 6 years ago

The ui is a little non-intuitive, but good for small teams. For repetitive process work or small distributed teams, I also like Azendoo or even Asana (which has the reports that managers crave)

The culture that feels entitled to free support definitely needs to be rejected however.

I have unpubished every open-source package I put out there (small as they were) because of the incessant demands from people who were not paying me to do whatever they demanded of me. It was demeaning and demoralizing.

In the 80s/90s, I would have just tossed a tar-ball over the wall and say "good luck - feel free to use it, if it suites your needs), but in the age of github, all sorts of folk show up demanding that I do this that or the other, with no offer of payment. My response was: "Look! You have the source code. Do what you want to it to make it fit your needs better. You can even do a pull request.". They didn't want to do that - they just wanted me to work for them for free. I opted out of the entire situation by unpublishing all of my previously published works.

* None of the packages were significant. One was a Flask-based SaaS-in-a-Box thing with home screens, user accounts, log-in (auth), payments and various utilities. The other was an early Pixar-era ray-tracer (renderer) that was slow, but very extensible and capable of making pretty pictures of landscapes and other things like caustics.

Removing the CEO 6 years ago

Great question, that I am going to answer badly, based on my environment.

AV (Austin Ventures) was always known as the big fish in the little pond, ever since I moved here from Japan - and I guess that isn't wrong, but they seemed to have moved onto their version of PE.

But one thing that always irritated me and my "executive" friends was how much they liked to put somebody on their back-bench into your job.

If it's the right choice - nice. If it happens once-or-twice - nice. But If they do it 9 months after every Series A every time, it starts to make a (n aware) founder wary).

I generally don't think founders should be CEOs. Certainly as a founder I should not have been But that doesn't mean youo bring out the brick-bat. It means that you sit down and say something: "Don't you think we should hire the new CEO together and figure our your ongoing role in the company (esp. since you still own 60%)?).

I don't know - I just found them heavy handed.

I don't know that I ever hit at them hard or that they hit at me hard, but I do know that they came in hard and triggered a hard response. At this point, I don't think they like me much (which is sad, because I was just getting to like them), but there are a lot of personal relationships (apparently) in this business

Removing the CEO 6 years ago

By Gawd - I certainly don't mind being down-voted, but since this is not Reddit, would people give the courtesy of telling me what they disagree with? Is that too much to ask?

A first level response would be that you were hired at a salary to do a job.

If you can't or won't do a coding job I hire you for, I would back-fill for myself and you would be on the street. (Cost of capital for startups isn't cheap!)

Hey! That's kind of how how I use the CLI (API?) at AWS. It works pretty well! And fortunately (for me), not too much thinking involved.

BTW: I have a D3 front-end dashboard/console for the app (not admin) that makes this a little bit harder, but D3 is pretty organized (and well-documented), if you can figure out what you are trying to do with it.

Maybe. I would say that for fiction, this is almost certainly true, but for non-fiction, a lot has been molecular biology, or nonlinear economics. Which are neither native to me. YMMV.