neop

Overall, I probably agree that Baba is You is a better game, but I think what makes Stephen's Sausage Roll receive so much praise is that the puzzle design is incredibly tight. It's a very straightforward concept and the core mechanic does not change between the first and the last level. But the puzzles are expertly crafted in a way that as you progress through the game you naturally come across situations where you think you know everything about the game and then it surprises you with a new mechanic that you did not expect.

Baba is You ramps up as you go to, but the ramping up is mostly done by the game giving you new tools to work with. Plus, the amount of interesting puzzles you can do with the mechanics of Baba is You is virtually endless, whereas SSG makes you feel like the game squeezed all the possible gameplay out of moving sausages around.

Location: Bay Area, CA

Remote: YES

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: iOS, Swift, Objective-C

Résumé/CV: http://linkedin.com/in/pablogom/

Email: pablo[at]shiftingmind[dot]com

-----------------------

I'm an iOS engineer with 10+ years of iOS experience, the last 6 years I've been working at Meta mostly focused on the Messenger and Instagram apps. I'm interested in building delightful native iOS experiences and have experience working with a wide range of iOS APIs and apps of all sizes.

Puzzling Places for Quest is kind of like that for jigsaw puzzles: https://www.realities.io/puzzling-places

http://www.bazqux.com/ - I paid for a lifetime subscription a couple years ago and never looked back. The interface is great is both desktop and mobile, since it’s online everything is kept in sync across devices and I can configure the interface to my liking. I tried many RSS readers and nothing came close.

It's only 4D. I believe they called it 5D chess because they didn't want people to interpret this as 3D chess + time. If I recall correctly, the tutorial mentions at some point that the 5th dimension is "unused".

My understanding is that Luigi is not in the final build of the game (which is why it was not found before). But I believe the recent leak contains the CVS repo used during development, which includes the complete change history.

A few years ago I wrote an article explaining how the chaos game works with high school level math, and a few couple of fun experiments that you can do with it. If anyone's interested you can read the article here: http://shiftingmind.com/chaosgame/

I recently worked on a production app that used Swift. It's certainly possible, but I wouldn't recommend it (yet). Writing Swift is nicer and feels much more natural than Objective-C, but the tools are not there yet.

Xcode crashes often (even more frequently than with Objective-C), the compiler will probably also crash at some point during development. Compiling Swift code is also considerably slower than compiling Objective-C code. Error messages are often cryptic and debugging compiler bugs is very time consuming.

There's also a few places in Swift where things still need some more time to settle, framework support is tricky and some very basic tasks are harder than they should be (for example, getting a substring).

Mozilla Bug Report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1024642

Webkit Bug Report: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133804

Apparently both of them are just waiting for Eric to confirm that this is OK.

The article suffers from a bit from looking at things from a strictly theoretical knowledge (i.e. the first example is not valid Swift code), but it does bring up a few interesting points.

Also check out http://iss.astroviewer.net to figure see what the ISS is currently over.

There's a play through with more details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv3K3ikSdsM

I'm still waiting for Jonathan Blow's take on all of this. He's another one of the "big" indie developers and he had previously stated that The Witness would work with Oculus, I wonder if the acquisition changes that.

He already tweeted about the news and RT some stuff, but no word on his plans yet.

Education in South Korea is often cited as the reason for their economic growth, but that doesn't quite match up, as discussed in this article:

http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA640.htm

There's also this article which talks about the downsides of their focus on education (for example, 40% of graduates are unemployed four months after leaving university):

http://www.economist.com/node/21541713

My personal take is that their economic growth and rise in test scores are both the result of the way their culture is set up. South Koreans tend to be extremely competitive and live under constant pressure to outperform their peers. For students this means that they study harder and for longer periods of time to do well in tests which makes them get some of the best scores around the world. For working people this means working an unhealthy amount of hours (South Korea often ranks at the top of the charts when it comes to measuring working hours) which is the most likely explanation for their economic growth. Both of these facts also contribute to South Korea having one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

Furthermore, I think there is a key point when it comes to education. South Korea is doing great at tests because that's what they're training for. Their education system centers around doing well in tests, not necessarily about learning the right concepts. There is a very big focus on memorization and they care more about doing well on a test than on actually learning. It is not uncommon for them to focus on memorizing previous exam questions to get the right answer rather than actually understanding the concepts to be able to correctly answer questions.

We were working on a product that used their SmartCamera product, seems like we will not be able to do that anymore. Their huge database and human recognition for worst case scenario were great. Does anyone know any good alternatives?

While that may be a good point, you also need to consider that Gmail is part of Google Apps for Business. I don't really mind the changes for my personal Gmail account since most of the emails that go through there are quite simple and these changes don't have any real impact on my workflow. But for my work account, it's a whole different story. Most of these changes make my experience quite annoying when dealing with business emails where I often need to copy email addresses, modify subjects, CC people, etc.

Breaking Gmail for business users doesn't seem like a good idea since they are the ones who are actually paying for the service.

Disregard that, I contacted Developer relations and apparently they may be holding tickets for all those in my situation.

This was certainly not the case here. Many people (including me) were able to add the tickets to their shopping cart and start the checkout process, only to be received by an error after entering shipping and billing information.

It's funny how these things work. I'm the developer of an iOS snake game called Space Snake (http://www.shiftingmind.com/spacesnake/). When I launched the game I quickly got to the top of the high scores, since I had been playing it myself for quite some time during development. I was very happy when someone finally beat my high score. It meant there was someone out there who liked my game enough to beat me at it.

I don't know much about AI, but I highly doubt Watson will revolutionize anything. Significant advances in AI will most likely come from better software and algorithms and while IBM is great at doing hardware, they are not so good when it comes to software. The way I see it, Watson is just IBM doing PR work to get people to know their brand since they don't really offer any consumer products anymore.

Thanks!

Thanks! I'll check this out...unfortunately I'm nowhere near Berkely :(

Thanks! This looks great :)

I've been looking for a good book on how to get started with meditation. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Many people here seem to be reading this as "Apple is stupid for switching to their own map app". But I think reading it as "Google is smart for forcing Apple to switch to an inferior map app" is a more realistic situation.

But Google placed restrictions on how Apple could use the data. For example, Google did not allow Apple to have turn by turn navigation.

This puzzles me. Last I heard, the Mac versions of Valve's games were slower than their Windows counterparts. So maybe it's more about the Linux kernel than about OpenGL? Is there any comparison between the three platforms on the same hardware?

I agree with the fact that RSS is not a good protocol. But as you said unfortunately there's no alternative. I guess what really surprised me is that people consider Twitter/Facebook an alternative to RSS.

I'm surprised that people here don't like RSS. While I do agree it's too complicated for the mainstream, for people who know what RSS is, I always though that it was clearly better than Twitter/Facebook. You have a lot more control with RSS feeds. I have over 100 feeds, there's some feeds where I truly care about the content and will always what to know when there's new content. There are other feeds where I might check them out in detail if I'm bored, but most likely I'll just skim through them. With twitter this kind of prioritization is simply not possible, there is only chronological order, and it's very likely that I would miss some of the stuff I care about.

I'm also learning Korean and I'm looking for a book to try and read. Unfortunately I haven't found any suggestions. From what I've heard children's books are actually harder to read because they use a lot of words that only children use. Harry Potter might be a good idea, but it seems to me like it would have a lot of fantasy related vocabulary which won't be very useful. A story set in modern day real world would probably be better.