xenthral

I'm looking for a job in Canada (vancouver or toronto preferably) that would sponsor me as 'arranged employment'. I'm pretty great with C++ (4+ years), Lua. My focus has always been on gamedev, 3D rendering.

I've also done professional webdev work with RoR, my Ruby is not ultra idiomatic so I wouldn't say I'm excellent at it, but I can get the job done. Also know my way around Javascript, though I'm really rusty.

I'm from Brazil and living here currently but I want to relocate and have taken all the necessary steps :)

contact at #{HN username}@gmail.com

Great advice.

I'd add to those book recommendations 'The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master' as well, great and fun read from beginning to end and good to open at any spot and read just a section.

Also a fantastic read, Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" (http://norvig.com/21-days.html), read that one ASAP, good to calibrate your expectations, when I first read it was both at once a cold shower of reality while simultaneously infusing in me a drive to become a competent and skilled programmer.

Have you looked into CMake to alleviate your compilation woes?

I recently started using it and its been very useful so far.

I'm 24 and I've been coding C++ for the past 4 years, it was my first language and remains the one I use the most, though I've used Ruby professionally most recently, I'm trying to get a C++ gamedev job now.

So its not just the older crowd, it very much depends on what you're trying to do I think.

Couldn't make the big "WELCOME TO FLYBYCHAT" left pane go away, so it felt like there was a lot of screen real state that was left unused.

Also the HN lurker I was chatting with raised a good point: there should be different colors for "You" and "Them", would make it much easier to see the flow of the conversation.

EDIT: Would also be easy to add a horizontal bar, to track the last portion of chat you saw before you switched tabs/removed focus from browser

More reason to hope facebook goes down in flames, and the sooner the better.

"Thank you CrunchBase and _Charlise_ Rose"

Thought I'd point out :)

Jobs wants to keep the walled garden pure of corruption.

Says not to eat of the fruit of the tree of porn, lest the consumer lose their innocence.

The serpent of webkit/safari tempts you.

What I've been wondering and am curious about is which of the straws is responsible for breaking the camel's back.

Could they have done the same thing, but in a larger timeline and have not generated the press frenzy? Was it that this last change was larger, was the combination of these 2 things?

Can't know for sure off course, but interesting to speculate IMO.

He lost me a bit earlier:

"I will eliminate Lua for the same reason [is not a general purpose language], though it has found a niche in the gaming community."

wat?

And then on a comment he says: "I should have written more about Prolog, Lua"

And proceeds not to write more about Lua, only Prolog.

I had definitely tried that before, recall issuing a 'mkdir .mozilla/plugins' & moving a .so in there. Can't remember why I rolled that back and reinstalled it through apt thought.

Anyways trying it again nonetheless, the blinking is still going on with scrolling, going to see if performance/crashing at least improves.

I went through a phase I tried installing everything under the sun and looked around quite a bit (the packages directly from adobe, different apt packages, random bash scripts I found online..) so I actually don't remember what I tested and didn't.

What I have _at the moment_ and doesn't work that well, I got through the 'flashplugin-nonfree' package which if I understand is the 'preferred' way to install flash on ubuntu 64.

I've tried both the apt package and downloading directly from adobe, to be honest I don't remember if there was a difference in problems, or just the same set of them, either way it didn't 'just work'.

How did you install? 'sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree' ?

"It's more than possible that your hardware configuration is the cause"

Its definitely not the hardware horsepower itself, as I have very good performance on 64 vista.

I'm also running with the very latest nvidia binary drivers, I have an intel dual core E2200 - not cutting edge but flash will actually take up an entire core with small animations, so it definitely seems like a bug to me.

"Get in touch with Adobe and let them know your config, the problem might be fixable."

I've spent a while (way way more than I ever wanted for something that they market as 'plug in' / 'just works') going through the ubuntu forums and launchpad, some stuff seems like fixeable problems that maybe I just couldn't fix, but heres a list of problems I have:

* Sometimes opening a new firefox/chromium tab/window and loading a website with flash will crash it, crashing all flash instances - so if I'm listening to a google tech talk or something I have to restart it and go hunt the on the timeline.

* Sometimes controllers just stop responding to clicks ( http://www.khattam.info/2009/08/18/solved-flashplugin-contro... )

* Flash will flicker as I scroll down firefox/chromium.

* This has stopped now, but at one point flash crashing wouldn't free its memory, and Xorg just started consuming more and more memory, bringing the entire computer to an almost halt!

* Some flash players/gamers/whatever when I'd press the fullscreen button would get from xorg as my resolution the sum of my 2 monitors - 2560x1024, which means they'd get clipped in half or they would get letterboxed (msnbc.com and youtube.com for instance) while others such as video.google.com works just fine.

These are just things off the top of my head - it seems flash is the #1 problem for 64 bit ubuntu from quick glances at the 64 bit forums, I've had a lot more problems, I tend to avoid flash websites as a result.

"Python falls in the middle of C and Lisp and thus is a useful comparison (and everyday-living) language."

Its a shame Lua isn't more widely used / known that would be an even better fit. Because its far more of a middle ground between those 2 than Python in my opinion, it gives you very little that you can do a lot with - for instance compare the singular Lua table with the wide choice of data structures Python offers.

Theres a great paper by Robert Ierusalimschy that goes through the multi-paradigm / extensibility that Lua offers:

http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/ry09-03.pdf

"deliver a decent Flash implementation on a mobile device before touting your mobile position."

I wish they'd do the same for desktop too. Flash doesn't really 'run' on my 64 bit ubuntu , it sputters and crawls and fucks up in a plethora of ways.

One of the things you want to hit up right away after you get reacquainted is the boost library: http://www.boost.org/

If you use it well, it does a lot of heavy lifting, adds a lot of safety and expressiveness (boost::bind is just pure magic) that just wasn't there before, and a lot of the boost libraries are going into the standard - and are already implemented in the TR1 namespace.

For bonus points on first item:

http://srm.sourceforge.net/

Wow.

This is hands down the best explanation of unicode in general, but UTF-8 in particular I've seen by far.

and I mean by FAR.

Thank you so much for this link!

"It's impressive. It feels like BeOS, unlike Zeta which was had poor quality."

I guess I should have clarified - I've never used BeOS either, or well, even seen it I think, so more detail would be interesting, but from what you're telling me so far its not in a very usable state, but nonetheless I'm curious, might install it some weekend.

Anyone ever used Haiku? And what were you mostly doing with it? What are the advantages if any [for that activity]?

I've known about the project for quite a while, pretty icons and whatnot, but never fired up a vmware-like program to install it and check it out.

> And the tweets almost never present an interesting opinion.

Could be worse, could be youtube comments.

Now that I think about it, I bet they must have read those at one point too.

control is such a nasty term. Steer, like a kindly ship captain.

Awesome, they recorded the gizmodo website shot (2:17) with firefox :)

Christopher Hitchen's review of the book and YC discussion on it:

http://www.slate.com/id/2243112/pagenum/all/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1094011

> "Like murderous humans or murderous rogue states, they tend to die quickly because everyone finds the behavior so intolerable."

I'm not sure this makes any sense at all. What if they view us as we view chickens? They could come to our planet and see an exotic and splendid buffet on display for their enjoyment.

Om nom nom.

You could make the case that a lot of other species here on earth are very smart. But they're more delicious than smart for us.

I think us humans are neat, I may be biased :)

Maybe aliens would be terribly unimpressed.

"Some of the campaigns have been controversial. Newkirk was criticized in 2003 when she sent a letter to PLO-leader Yasser Arafat asking him to keep animals out of the conflict after a donkey was laden with explosives during an attack in Jerusalem."

PETA isn't logical. The Bullshit! episode on them (and animal rights advocacy in general) is very good.

> "What about "hate speech"? This is forbidden by the laws of the U.S."

I'm not an american citizen, my opinion is that hate laws shouldn't exist. And most certainly not any law protecting against blasphemy of any sort - glad we agree there.

> "There is a lot of religous fervour behind these anti Islamic-culture movements, and a lot of it has little to do with free speech. A lot of it is mostly just religion."

Oh I couldn't agree more, theres a lot of religious bigotry in this world. I don't see how this is relevant to the discussion, why should matt and trey self-censorship? Are you afraid they might be interpreted as being religious bigots? What if they secretly are? It just doesn't matter.

> "Islamic-culture movements"

Again, not all muslims think portraying the prophet is a sin, as far as I know (which isn't that far, I'm no religious scholar) all Shia sects don't see it as so.

> "Look at the way people vote down anything mildly pro the other side and vote up comments that are just anti-islam."

I'm upvoting anything I see as a defense of freedom of speech, and maybe I'm upvoting comments that have been upvoted by bigots, I can't help if they are on the right side (in my opinion) for the wrong reasons, I won't stop making my argument just because people with horrible intent agree with it for the wrong reasons.

> "I'm asking that this aspect of muslim culture be respected, just as words with slave origins are not used on TV."

Actually they quite frequently are. Maybe the frequent is there cause I mostly watch HBO.

> "All I want is that we all just respect each other and not mock each other."

I share that sentiment, I truly do.

But I'm not willing to compromise and capitulate my freedom of speech to respect other people's (in my opinion) nonsensical and fetishistic beliefs.

I won't do it for christians, jains, buddhists, jews, muslims. Thats equality - you earlier spoke of double standards, I strive not to have them :)

And if you really think this isn't an erosion of freedom you just aren't following this subject, there are people who are living under death threats for writing novels, and I'm not talking about the countries that have it inscribed under sharia law, I'm talking about western nations, look around the examples are plentiful - and this makes me want to do is show the prophet more, not less, not as a provocation but as a statement of freedom and civilization.

[edit: clarity/styling]

> "Rather, you're just provoking someone else for no reason."

Actually it doesn't have anything to do with them, if they are offended its because they chose to watch, I did not force them to.

And what are these people you want to protect that they can't take an offensive world. I can, if they can't thats their problem, I won't limit what I say - these campaigns of intimidation also involve mere criticism of people that bare some similarities to Mohammed (see Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, which is actually not about Mohammed).

> "There is a lot of censorship going on in the world, and a lot of real things that you cannot say without being harshly criticized and thrown out of your job or something. That's what you should be concerned about."

We're talking about private citizens who chose to make a movie here, this isn't a corporate environment, the southpark creators are not bound by any contract that they willingly signed that states they must curb their offensiveness to particular groups.

[edit: actually they signed something with comedy central surely, but thats an internal affair for them, this has been released to the public now]

> "This particular example, is just an attack on an alternative religion"

Alternative to what? That doesn't even make sense, you were just mentioning, as if it had any weight, the fact they are 1 billion+

> "and what really hides behind this "freedom of speech" diversion is cultural intolerance and anti-muslim sentiment."

You don't know that, you're speculating, but you know what, I'll concede that a lot of it can be that. Theres also a lot of anti-catholic sentiment, a LOT of anti-atheist sentiment, etc. I believe freedom of speech covers hate speech as well.

"Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters" - Rosa Luxemburg.

> "The people who will argue that it should be allowed to mock another persons God will say nothing when Australia censors."

Actually I will stand up against stupid australian censorship and criticize it. One doesn't preclude the other.

> "If you want to fight for freedom of speech, then fight for real freedom of speech, not for this type of cultural attacks that try to use freedom of speech as their reason."

Actually I think the place that needs freedom of speech the most in the world right now is the muslim world, and we should lead by example, and yes, the example of mocking, and iconoclasm. And I know muslims out there that agree with that position.