sray

It’s an expression of surprise or disbelief, in the same vein as “oh my goodness.” It’s a bit old-fashioned; nowadays you’ll mostly hear it in cartoons and the like, uttered by little old ladies.

No shade to DamnInteresting; I find it quite endearing.

The Git book does a perfectly good job of this: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2

I always recommended reading chapters 1-3 and skimming chapter 7 to people who are just getting started with Git.

The author of the post is aware of this. They explicitly say that is not the point of the question.

“Nobody [does thing] anymore” is a common euphemism for “very few people [do thing] now, compared to in the past”. The author is correct about this with respect to cursive, at least in the US. I think you know this as well, as you acknowledge your outlier status.

My favorite response to “How are you?” comes from a Russian former coworker: “Average. Worse than yesterday, better than tomorrow”.

Except it’s not like a flea market in the parking lot. It’s more like Walmart had a flea market, but mixed all of the items in with their own, inside of the store, and made it difficult for a casual buyer to tell the difference.

I liked the article, but, as a game developer who does not specialize in graphics, I really liked one of the comments:

Joe Kilner - One extra issue with games is that you are outputting an image sampled from a single point in time, whereas a frame of film / TV footage is typically an integration of a set of images over some non-infinitesimal time.

This is something that, once stated, is blatantly obvious to me, but it's something I simply never thought deeply about. What it's saying is that when you render a frame in a game, say the frame at t=1.0 in a game running at 60 FPS, what you're doing is capturing and displaying the visual state of the world at a discrete point in time (i.e. t=1.0). Doing the analogous operation with an analogous physical video camera means you are capturing and compositing the "set of images" between t=1.0 and t=1.016667, because the physical camera doesn't capture a discrete point in time, but rather opens its shutter for 1/60th of a second (0.16667 seconds) and captures for that entire interval. This is why physical cameras have motion blur, but virtual cameras do not (without additional processing, anyway).

This is obvious to anyone with knowledge of 3D graphics or real-world cameras, but it was a cool little revelation for me. In fact, it's sparked my interest enough to start getting more familiar with the subject. I love it when that happens!

So if you manage to keep tabs on the industry through your colleagues and you're excited about what you're working on at work, then the personal projects are much less important, but you need to demonstrate that.

I disagree. If passion is an important quality to you, then, as the interviewer, you need to ask questions that reveal whether or not the candidate has that quality. It's absurd to ask about personal projects as a proxy for asking "are you passionate about programming" and then to expect the candidate to guess your true intentions and answer accordingly.

1. There's no indication that account belongs to the Bill Nguyen in question. Nguyen in one of the most common surnames in the world, and Bill is an exceedingly common first name.

They're selling like gangbusters: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/aug/31/lego-frie...

The best part of the article is the response from Avalanche, the studio that developed the original game. Rather than try to shut the project down, they praised the authors and invited them over for a visit. Awesome! When companies act like that, it makes me want to support them.

Did you even read the post? The author is hardly freaking out, never worries about passing classes, and never once claims that his lectures are boring. He's simply asking his fellow students to respect each other and the classroom, which is perfectly reasonable.

Furthermore, I know that shitting on universities is en vogue, but give me a break. Perhaps you are the one who "did it wrong" and were bored because you chose the wrong university, or the wrong field of study? Or, just maybe, different people learn in different ways?

Thanks, but you didn't really explain anything. In what specific ways does it fail to scale well?

Can you explain your reasoning? Isn't high scalability one of MongoDB's key features?

I'm with you. Accidents happen, but most can be prevented if you just treat your expensive device with care and respect. I find that people really don't like that advice, though!

Isn't that the kind of not-valuing-food mentality the article talks about? Your reheated vegetables are going to be overcooked and your fried-and-sauced Chinese will get soggy, but they're still edible. They still provide sustenance.

I love fine food, but not every meal has to be amazingly delicious. In the end, it's about putting energy into your body, so why not lower your standards a bit and eat last night's soggy orange chicken for lunch?

As an aside, you can improve your leftovers with proper preparation. For example, yaks_hairbrush above claims that chicken strips and fries don't reheat well, but I reheat fried foods in the oven regularly, and they're perfectly edible.

I was the youngest in a tiny family, and never had much exposure to children younger than myself. As such, I grew up not liking kids very much - I thought they were obnoxious, loud, selfish little creatures.

Then, about 10 years ago, I met my now-wife and got pulled into her gigantic family, complete with dozens of nieces and nephews. Not really knowing how to interact with young children, I just talked to them like adults - not dumbing down what I said, making jokes and references that there was no possibility they would understand - I found it kind of amusing to talk to a child like that.

But, the funny thing is, they really responded to being treated that way. And, it was fascinating to see how they reacted to my comments and questions. A lot of times I would say something I thought was totally over their heads, yet they would inevitably furrow their brows, and come up with some kind of response - often showing an amazing level of comprehension. It was really interesting to see how a child's thought process works, and how it changes as they grow.

As a perverse revenge against someone who didn't like kids, they all grew fond of me. I guess they liked being treated as people instead of dumb little kids.

Epilogue: I actually grew to like children... or the mostly-well-behaved ones, anyway.

This is, to use a word I never use, delightful! Great concept, whimsical design, and wonderful execution. Well done!

Now, if I could only stop flipping the pages and get back to work...

Constructive criticism: After reading the description, I don't understand what this application does. I am not initmately familiar with indoor mapping/positioning or WiFiSLAM. The term "indoor mapping showcase" is vague to me.

I think it lets me build maps of indoor locations? Somehow? Based on the screenshots, maybe by walking around my room? It seems like it could be neat, but I don't want to go through the trouble of downloading an app if I don't know what it does.

The OP's interactive panorama is extremely cool, but I prefer the original you linked here. With the color shift and distortion, the interactive one feels dreamy and imaginary. The original is just so raw, real, and powerful. It makes me think "holy shit, this thing is on another planet, and it looks a lot like our own!" I can almost imagine standing next to the rover, surveying the desolate, alien landscape.

What an amazing time we live in!

It all depends on the person, and there's no way to tell without asking. If someone doesn't want to talk, it's quite easy to tell from their response to the question. If that's the case, you end the conversation there, and nobody cares.

Anecdotally, I have started many conversations with service people this way, and I'm not much of a talker. In fact, it's usually them telling me about how horribly things are going, and I just listen. It's interesting how often a perfect stranger will open up to you if you just show a little empathy.

That's a curious world view. People should be embarrassed by things you personally find disgusting, even if they're within accepted social norms? And you are amazed that people do things are socially acceptable? Pardon me if I say that I find that a bit self-centered.

I'm not sure where you live, but at least in the US, it's acceptable to discreetly blow your nose in many public situations (the dining table not being one of those).

For full disclosure, I should mention that my nose runs a bit more than most. ;)

That little program is what got me interested in programming as a kid.

I played games nonstop on my (parents') Apple II, and loved it. But seeing those two lines of code produce "Hello!" over and over on the screen blew my mind.

You see, I thought games were amazing because I could manipulate these little worlds, and I could doing anything imaginable within their rulesets. But, seeing "Hello!" scroll forever and ever made me realize that, with this coding thing, there were no rules. The fact that I could make this computer do whatever I wanted, if only I could speak its language, was irresistible.

So of course, I modified the program to say "Hello sray!" and "Hello <this>" and "Hello <that>" and "Sray's brother smells", and so on and so forth. And then I figured out how to add spaces to each line to make a cool zig-zag effect. And so on and so forth... most of us know how it goes.

Anyway, this little trip down nostalgia lane isn't going to help you get your son interested in coding. But it's interesting how different kids react to the same thing.

Just to make sure that I understand what you mean here - are you saying that games have no value?

This ongoing "Learn to Code" discussion reminds me OWS. Ask ten different people what it stands for, and you'll get ten different answers. If you try and argue against any part of it, someone will tell you that you "just don't get it."

In the end, all I get out of it is the impression that we "hackers" sure think highly of ourselves.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/fizzbuzz-the-progra...

Pertinent passage: FizzBuzz was presented as the lowest level of comprehension required to illustrate adequacy. There's no glory to be had in writing code that establishes a minimum level of competency. Even if you can write it in five different languages or in under 50 bytes of code.

>A developers are the ones whose idea of a "puzzle" is solving the fundamental business problem via software. B programmers think that super elegant engineering is great, and don't care about business so much.

I couldn't agree with this more, although I would say "B programmers love to solve every problem. A programmers love to solve the problems that matter."

I have worked with many people, some quite brilliant, that simply can't prioritize issues. If they perceive something as broken or sub-optimal, they absolutely must fix it, no matter how minor the problem. If you can reign them in and keep them focused, this type of programmer can produce great things. But it takes a lot of management time and energy. I'd rather work with someone who can see the larger picture and focus on solving the actual problem, even if the implementation isn't 100% perfect.

This reminds me of And the Rock Cried Out, a short story by Ray Bradbury. The story revolves around two American tourists who are in South America when the US and much of Europe is wiped out by nuclear attacks during the Cold War. With the US in rubble, everyone is out to get the tourists as payback for all of the terrible things America has done in the past.

Anyway, they eventually meet a man named Garcia who offers them help. They're shocked, since everyone else wants them dead. Garcia explains:

Do you read the papers? Of course, you do. But do you read them as I read them? I rather doubt that you have come upon my system. No, it was not exactly myself that came upon it; the system was forced upon me. But now I know what a clever thing it has turned out to be. I always get the newspapers a week late, from the Capital. And this circumstance makes for a man being a clear-thinking man. You are very careful with your thinking when you pick up a week-old paper.

That always stuck with me for some reason.

I think you're missing the point. It's not about becoming great at something. It's about being exceptional at one thing. It's about spending every moment of your life either practicing or thinking about that thing, to the detriment of everything and everyone else. It's about being possessed with the desire to be the best. And that is weird, by definition - only a small fraction of people have such dedication to one pursuit. It's not just passion - it's obsession.

And, in the end, it's the feeling you get when you've attained that level of mastery, and the hollowness you feel when you give it up to focus on a more balanced life.

Many people would be jealous of someone with such skill, but few would envy the work and the exclusionary lifestyle required to get there.

I think this is really cool from a technical perspective, but I don't understand the purpose of the guided recipe tool.

Why would I want to create a recipe with the tool in the first place? If I'm just submitting an existing recipe of mine to an online database, then the ingredient/quantity predictions aren't that helpful. If I'm trying to create a new recipe, then why would I want to submit it? I've never cooked it before - it might be terrible!

Even a short blurb on the recipe tool page explaining what I should use it for and why it's useful would be helpful. As it stands, this dumb user doesn't get it.

BTW, I love the design of the main page and the "create a recipe page". Very clean and easy to use. However, while viewing a recipe, I found it a little odd that the ingredients were listed in the right column. I found myself looking at the picture and reading the instructions before ever seeing the ingredients.