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pollen23

It does. Source: me, living in one of these countries.
If you're talking about the past-past (say up until the mid-nineties) IMHO you're wrong. Pre-mass-internet there wasn't really anywhere to share code. People were swapping floppies, or dialing bulletin boards. The competetiveness was absolutely real.

Also, pride.. If you wanted to figure out how an effect was done, either you reverse engineered the binary, or you figured it out on your own, based on your own experience and the occasional hint.

You have to remember that the demoscene largely grew out of the cracking scene (well, that + Compunet) in the mid-eighties, where _being first_ to release a cracked version of a game was of great importance. Likewise, being first to create a new effect for a demo.

I remember reading Howard Rheingold's book "Virtual Reality" when it came out almost 30 years ago, and seeing the Alvy Ray Smith (co-founder of Pixar) quote where he claimed that "Reality is 80 million polygons per second"

80 million is nothing nowadays, and we still have 20 years to go. How could he be so far off?

Re:Stellar Smart Contracts on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @09:49AM (#18184795)
I don't think there's anything in the definition of smart contracts that necessarily has it defined to be what they are in Ethereum.

They are very different, that's for sure.

Assets are first class objects though, so 95% of what Ethereum smart contracts do is built into the platform already.

Re:MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike on Friday December 15, 2017 @09:42PM (#15937118)
It's not run by "a set of trusted third parties".

It's run by SETS of trusted third parties, where each individual node specifies what set of nodes it trusts to not collude against it.

You don't need any ones permission to run a node, but it is up to other nodes if they want to trust you

Re:Where polyfill came from / on coining the term on Thursday February 18, 2016 @08:16AM (#11125477)
It always confuses the hell out of me when I see this. Back when I grew up, a polyfiller was a polygon filler, i.e. a polygon rasterizer for computer graphics.
Re:Show HN: What parts of your code are not original on Saturday February 06, 2016 @08:59AM (#11047761)
This gives me severe flashbacks to clueless clients/PMs. We had projects we had to run through Black Duck -- "No open source code."

The reference implementation of the Mersenne Twister was once GPL, although it wasn't anymore at that time. Still, there are only so many ways you can implement a Mersenne Twister. So my implementation got flagged.

Re:Google Will Soon Shame All Websites That Are Unencrypted on Wednesday January 27, 2016 @10:10PM (#10985896)
Not all countries have feminine gender, just check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatherland
I wish I could downvote this a million times.
This.

Words used in patent claims are always defined by how they are used in the context of the patent description.

You can't read the claims and think you understand what they cover, without reading the description. A thesaurus doesn't matter, wikipedia doesn't matter, the opinion of an math professor doesn't matter. Patent description.

Re:Face Recognition with 25 Lines of Python Code on Friday July 31, 2015 @11:14PM (#9985758)
s/Recognition/Detection/
Re:Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read? on Thursday July 16, 2015 @12:08PM (#9898067)
Doesn't Guido himself preface some of the things in PEP8 as being his pet peeves?
Re:The maybe worst captcha out there: SVGCaptcha on Thursday June 25, 2015 @07:56PM (#9781682)
Open the SVG file. The characters are all there, you just have to sort them into the right order. Not much of an improvement. Or maybe not... * Are trivial to crack by a computer. * Are trivial to solve for a human.
Re:The easiest way to use Docker on your Mac on Tuesday April 21, 2015 @09:31AM (#9413847)
"Stops at 99%" sums it up for me, on 10.10.3
Re:Hiring makers of products for innovation team on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @10:13PM (#9308282)
Fair enough :)
Re:Hiring makers of products for innovation team on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @10:06PM (#9301125)
You're working on remote collaboration, but not really eating your own dog food. Offices in SF and SJ. What's remote with that?
Never roll your own crypto?

Also, D-H was published 39 years ago, before the author was even born.

Re:Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents on Friday February 13, 2015 @09:30PM (#9048488)
Am I the only one who doesn't see what's so innovative about Spritz? About ten years ago or so, when people didn't create startups for every little side-project they had, there were speed reading java applets that did just about the exact same thing as Spritz.
"Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" is from 2001, and looks a lot more like the right half of the image than the left.
Re:Ask HN: Why do people bid early on eBay? on Monday July 28, 2014 @02:29AM (#8095473)
I really haven't done auctions in years, but with the way ebay works, with the current price one bid increment above the previous bidders maximum price, what's there to gain from sniping? You wait until the last minute or so, and then _hope_ that the leading bidder has set a lower maximum price than yours? Or hope that they don't understand how ebay works, more likely.

Personally, I would put in a bid whenever I found something I was looking for, and then wait for the email telling me I'd won, if ever. No emotional investment, no getting caught up. I'd just figure out what's the most I'd pay for something, and then go.

Re:Lens Blur in the new Google Camera app on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @11:17PM (#7601865)
Nokia Refocus is quite different.

Refocus is a set of photos with different focal lengths, and a look up table.

For each "pixel" (The look up table isn't full resolution) the look up table tells which of the photos has the most variance (i.e., is the most focused) at that point, and the viewer simply switches the photo that's shown.

Re:Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2013) on Sunday September 01, 2013 @11:15AM (#6310677)
SEEKING WORK - Remote preferred. Southeast Asia/EU.

If you have a higher end non-Apple mobile phone, chances are pretty high that I've been involved in some of the software embedded in it. I developed/co-invented the core tech of a mobile imaging middleware shipped in 1B+ devices.

My professional experience (10+ years) is mostly high performance C/C++ on (more or less) constrained devices, but I'm no stranger to more webby things; I actually just placed four in a dev contest in a major metropolitan city here in SEA, developing a web forum (python+redis+jquery) in six hours.

What I'm good at - Innovating, analyzing and managing tech, prototyping, proof-of-concepts, architecture

Let's talk.

hello AT pollen23 DOT com