DarkShikari

95 ms·

1. 751.▲
   by DarkShikari 18y ago

   I agree with the article for the most part. People like to think they're special because of their ideas, but ideas are easy to come by. I find this strongly depends. I agree with the article, but this sentence seems to generalize it a bi
2. 752.▲
   by DarkShikari 18y ago

   To quote a fellow developer on this topic: <pengvado> that brings back the memory: <pengvado> windows is posix compliant <pengvado> every single posix function returns ENOTIMPLEMENTED, which is one complying implemen
3. 753.▲
   by DarkShikari 18y ago

   I speed read--but not books. I like books too much to speed-read them. But I do speed-read code. When coding, I am bottlenecked not by my ability to program, but by my ability to come up with ideas. And one of the best ways to come up wi
4. 754.▲
   by DarkShikari 18y ago

   Are you serious? I had to reinstall Windows on my laptop the other day, but since I didn't have a Windows CD with me, I installed Ubuntu to use in the meantime until I got back home to reinstall Windows. Ubuntu worked fine out of the box a
5. 755.▲
   by DarkShikari 18y ago

   I love a good shmup. Indeed, and the ones with good bullet patterns aren't just fun to play, they're even just fun to look at ! Examples: http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/Flash/extra.html http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/Flash/saextra.html (
6. 756.▲
   by DarkShikari 18y ago

   Is it really that new? Indie games have been popular for quite some time--maybe they're just coming more into the spotlight now, but this trend has been going on for quite a while. See my post at http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=398305
7. 757.▲
   by DarkShikari 18y ago

   IRC is your friend. I have gotten almost all my best jobs from corporations/people on an IRC channel looking for a contract for assistance doing X. Replace X with your specialty, and find the associated Freenode channel. Depending on your
8. 758.▲
   by DarkShikari 18y ago

   Shockingly popular indie games aren't really anything new--its just that people seem to be noticing them more, especially in this day and age of extremely high budget games. People are always surprised to see one or two-man projects earnin
9. 759.▲
   by DarkShikari 18y ago

   I have a 5000-line, awfully written and horribly slow (but working!) patch from an offshore team that implements the rather complicated MBAFF features of H.264 in the open source x264 encoder. I'm going to take it and make it committable. Y
10. 760.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    If you want to look at an interesting example of a successful independent game designer, look at ZUN, the developer of the wildly popular Touhou Project shmup series. You'll notice a few things: 1. He's stuck to a genre that, while still
11. 761.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    I'd add two more, from my own experience. 1. Contribute to an open source project. It gives you a great experience in real-world coding, as opposed to the seemingly-meaningless assignments one often gets in a class. Plus, it's great to
12. 762.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    Totals grouped by language (dominant language first): ansic: 29367 (70.03%) asm: 9186 (21.91%) sh: 3124 (7.45%) perl: 257 (0.61%) I've always found those cost estimators to be rather use
13. 763.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    There are some serious weaknesses in it they should address though before adding complex features like multithreading. For example, while Emacs is a pretty damn powerful OS, it's still lacking a decent text editor.
14. 764.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    I charge $100/hr for consulting relating to video encoding and compression. I'm a college student, but I can get away with it because its such a great niche (and there aren't very many of us compressionists out there who aren't covered in
15. 765.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    It isn't always black and white. I run Windows. But I have half a dozen SSH sessions open to Linux boxes, and I do my development exclusively under Cygwin (which is sufficient, 99% of the time, to develop for other *nix systems). And I hav
16. 766.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    MSVC the "most advanced" compiler, despite: 1. Doesn't support C99. 2. Can't correctly align its stack, making SSE optimizations of any sort a complete nightmare and forcing us to disable a number of optimizations when compiling under MSV
17. 767.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    Every few years, they tell us that performance won't matter anymore in a few years, because CPUs keep getting faster. "In a few years any CPU will be able to decode DVDs easily. SIMD will be obsolete!" And every single time, a few years pa
18. 768.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    "Generic native code" is quite literally a contradiction in terms. What kind of virtual machine are you proposing that doesn't require translation of instructions from some intermediate bytecode instruction set into x86 (a process sometime
19. 769.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    Intrinsics are no substitute for handwritten assembly, and anyone who has actually tried to use them should know this. Compilers are dumb . This gets an order of magnitude worse when you expose them to SIMD.
20. 770.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    Yes, the performance increase is mostly from SIMD (though not entirely: we have a few assembly functions with minimal to no SIMD that offer a great improvement over pure C). Though I would quite confidently say that our C code is quite a bi
21. 771.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    "Legacy" C code? There's a good reason we wrote x264 in C: can you imagine trying to write a performance-critical app like that in Java? The assembly alone contributes a 5-7x performance increase: the difference between running real-time HD
22. 772.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/
23. 773.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    The aliasing rules in C. Almost every single case I have found of performance-critical code being compiled suboptimally is due to redundant load/stores being emitted due to aliasing restrictions. And no, the "restrict" keyword doesn't fix
24. 774.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    It's always good to keep old code around. You never know when it'll be useful. A while back (~2006-07) some developers wrote an H.264 encoder and submitted it to the ffmpeg project (code can be found at http://research.edm.uhasselt.be/h26
25. 775.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    Indeed, this is quite true; I have functions which are as much as 18 times faster in SIMD assembly than in C. This is one reason every programmer should spend a few days learning assembly: it teaches you that the compiler is stupid.
26. 776.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    I didn't say I was only replicating--I said that it took me a few hours to be able to replicate SVN . The reason you switch isn't to replicate SVN, its to take advantage of the other features available, like local commits (see http://new
27. 777.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    I'd say from experience that significantly less effort is spent transitioning to git than is spent worrying about and complaining about git before actually trying out the switch. It took me a few hours to learn enough in git to replicate
28. 778.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    Freenode: #x264dev, #x264, #avisynth, #ffmpeg, #videolan, #mplayer, #ffmpeg-devel, #mplayerdev, #xvid, #uncov Rizon: #darkhold, #cccp
29. 779.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    This one made me an ESTJ, which is completely unlike me. Organizing and efficient? Preferring highly structured work environments?! I'm actually an INTP, which means that this test gave the direct opposite of the correct results... does
30. 780.▲
    by DarkShikari 18y ago

    Because you no longer have to think much before committing. You don't have to spend hours reviewing the code and having others look over the patch before you push it to the main tree: you can just commit it locally and go work on something