gfaregan

IF Comp 2024 has started! Everyone is encouraged to play and rate the amazing games!

I think your social standing has a lot more to do with money than behavior. If you're rich and live in a van you're interesting, otherwise you're just homeless. If your gig is a successful business you're independent, if it's Uber you're barely surviving.

Why would sealing a balloon framed house be dangerous? I know that you need blocking to help stop a fire from spreading between floors.

> Today tech companies “are becoming much more reluctant to patent their discoveries, because they don’t want the public to know exactly what they’re doing.

I want to know what they're doing...

Do you have any references or diagrams for the system?

I had a Sansa clip of some type and it lasted about as long as the cheap $5 mp3 player I bought next. These days I find it more convenient to use my phone. You can play mp3s just fine on a phone.

Zeno also knew that arrows arrive at their target in finite time. That's why it is a paradox.

If something is useful, it will be used and developed. I certainly can't see where all this is going, but I doubt the resistance will be more than a speed bump.

Things have a price when the buyer and seller agree on a price. If only the seller thinks it's worth more than 50k, it's not really worth more than 50k.

I'm not sure if it's much of a productivity gain, but the way I have it set up it is really easy to navigate quickly and precisely through buffers, folds, characters, etc. And it always works once I've installed my config files without any further messing around.

I think that generative AI will keep getting significantly better. All the folks who keep saying it's not that good (which it isn't now I suppose) will start to sound like the folks who claimed that a computer could never become the go champion. The main issue raised is that it generates untrue things, which will be mitigated by some statistical/learned estimate on truthiness.

Ten levels of C++ templates and typedefs are a pretty good way of proving how smart you are and making the code completely opaque.

Or if the shareholders had any say in it, they could pay a dividend and let the market decide.

Classical and continuum mechanics are hundreds of years old. A surprising amount of the numerics is pretty old too.

Here are a couple interactive fiction games with complex magic systems:

- Suveh Nux by David Fisher

- The Wand by Arthur DiBianca

I can see a couple of obstacles:

Complex simulation based mechanics are much harder to implement than more basic fighting mechanics.

Puzzles require more work and hand crafting than creating new monsters to kill.

The whole project is probably more work, harder to scale, and has an unproven audience.

You don't see too many recumbent bikes around despite their being awesome. Do you have any thoughts on recumbent bikes vs trikes?

I keep an old hand brace in my toolbox and it's amazing. It doesn't need a cord or a battery and you can get a lot of torque out of it.

To add to this, I would really suggest that you get some perspective before you create a long list of tasks/books. Stillwell is not a popular science book but covers modern branches of mathematics. You could easily take a course in college and still have no idea what the point is at the end if your teacher is bad enough. You might also want to ask/search on math stack exchange rather than HN.

I liked that book. It uses differentials to give simple explanations of various derivatives, which seems to be frowned upon these days. You can download the book for free if I'm not mistaken. I once recommended it to a calculus class I was TAing for, though I don't think they were very impressed.

Mathematics is very broad. You might try something like "Mathematics and its history" by John Stillwell to get some perspective on the subject.

From my experience with graduate school I would add two points:

1. It helps to have a clear goal. Most of the people I knew viewed a PhD as a job qualification like an undergrad degree or a professional degree and they now work in tech. Others became professors, which had been their goal probably from before undergrad.

2. Social skills are really important for learning, working, getting help with problems, staying motivated, etc. This is still true for highly technical subjects, but isn't really taught explicitly.

My only rule for variable names is to never use abbreviations.

How about learning 4D chess at 40?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that art and science aren't really comparable like this. If science us a synonym for precision, you need skill to do things precisely and logically. As for modern art, I wouldn't mind having a few Picassos ;)

They say skill without creativity is craftsmanship and creativity without skill is modern art. I wonder what creativity without skill would be in science...