NickPollard

18 ms·

61.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Jon Blow is a smart guy, but this sounds like he just hasn't looked at the problem long enough and deep enough to understand it. I'm sure almost everyone here has at some point looked at a task an said 'Oh that's easy, I
62.
by NickPollard 12y ago
The headline here is attention grabbing, but this is actually a very solid interview with an expert developer talking about the pitfalls of protocol and API development, and the issues both technical and political of such a huge change of s
63.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Also, I don't know what Hong Kong is like, but London has been a major city for about 2000 years, and under the surface contains not only rail lines, but sewers, tunnels, underground rivers, burial pits, bunkers, luxury belgravia basem
64.
by NickPollard 12y ago
I don't have evidence but I always assumed they do it to mask wear and dirt - the odd geometrical patterns make it less obvious how old and dirty they are, compared to a single clean colour.
65.
by NickPollard 12y ago
The Bitsquid developers are very, very savvy programmers and I find myself agreeing with almost all the design decisions they made in their engine - in fact, my engine uses a lot of similar patterns and constructs. I wasn't aware they
66.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Scala's collections have this function as headOption, which I use almost exclusively over head.
67.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Here's one from Scientific American: In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing t
68.
by NickPollard 12y ago
I would love to read that, you should definitely do it. Where in the UK did you travel?
69.
by NickPollard 12y ago
It's also more important. Generally with tests, you're less concerned about having some particular examples succeed, than you are with finding if there are possible values that fail.
70.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Thanks for the reply. That makes sense; my scenes are probably 100-200k, but my fragment shaders are much more complex so the depth pre-pass makes a huge difference.
71.
by NickPollard 12y ago
How many polys does a MineCraft scene normally run to? I don't know if they already do this, but for my mobile game I run a depth pre-pass where I render depth only with a no-op shader to build a full depth buffer, which then means tha
72.
by NickPollard 12y ago
The shuttle is a tool. If you're growing crystals in space or trying to measure gravity waves, you don't mention the spacecraft, but you have to get the experimental equipment up there some how or you can't do it. Note: Not s
73.
by NickPollard 12y ago
No. There are only 4 axes in 4-dimensional space - every point is described as a 4d vector, i.e scalar positions along each axis: (x,y,z,w). xy, xz, etc. are not planes in 4d space - they are 3d-hyperplanes, and perpendicular to them are pl
74.
by NickPollard 12y ago
I agree with most of what you say; different people have different tastes though. Like you I spend most of my money on rent (I also live in London) and food - in the case of rent, probably 50% of that is paying for location. I moved recentl
75.
by NickPollard 12y ago
It doesn't need to be guaranteed, it just needs to be better expected value, with a volatility you're willing to accept. Risk, like debt, is not always a bad thing, as long as you're informed and understanding of it. As Danie
76.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Some sensible advice here, but also ignoring all debt is not a good idea. I used to have a similarly black-and-white view, but now I realise that debt is simply another trade-off to be considered. Remember, your life is precious. Don't
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by NickPollard 12y ago
I recently implemented Fresnel reflection in my mobile game engine; it's one of those things which makes an objectively small difference but a subjectively large one.
78.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Apparently the human retina can detect some UV wavelengths, but the UV light is normally blocked by the lens and does not reach the retina. Some patients who have had replacement artificial lenses develop the ability to see some portion of
79.
by NickPollard 12y ago
I like this, I think as an aphorism it actually has a good bit of descriptive power. A while back I started learning the guitar - having learnt drums and (some) piano as a child with a teacher and structured learning, I decided to teach mys
80.
by NickPollard 12y ago
I assume he's referring to harvesting of resources in space - e.g. comets contain large amounts of (frozen) water, so one way of getting water into space could be to send small spaceships up to harvest it from comets, rather than big s
81.
Europe's Rosetta probe goes into orbit around comet 67P(bbc.co.uk)
234 points by NickPollard 12y ago|73 comments
82.
by NickPollard 12y ago
If this was available on Ubuntu, I would definitely spend £37 on it.
83.
by NickPollard 12y ago
It probably would help, but is also more expensive, and I would expect the bus companies to be quite careful planning their upgrade cycles and end-of-lifing for buses.
84.
by NickPollard 12y ago
You can definitely force developers to contribute to Transit development. In London, for example, the developer for Battersea Power Station was required to contribute £100 million (~ $150m) to the extension of the Northern Line (part of the
85.
by NickPollard 12y ago
Both Google and Mozilla have co-working spaces in London, you might try them: * https://www.campuslondon.com/ * https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contact/spaces/london/ There's a variet
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by NickPollard 12y ago
I think the great thing about Trello is simplifying down to a pure visual metaphor. Trello is about putting lists of cards on boards. That's it. You can use it to do all kinds of things, but it's a medium rather than a framework.
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by NickPollard 12y ago
Yes, that's what this trick is for. In most standard 3D graphics, the CPU passes a description of the scene as polygons to the GPU, which then does two[1] shader steps - vertex and fragment[2] shading. The vertex shading works at the l
88.
by NickPollard 12y ago
I haven't read Wadler's paper, so he may well refer to this, but he relation between programs and proofs generally falls under the well-known Curry--Howard Correspondence[1], Curry being, of course, Haskell Curry, namesake of the
89.
by NickPollard 12y ago
I did not even know this was possible, thanks for bringing it to my attention. As someone who has had numerous electoral roll forms sent piled up in my letterbox, refusing to cease since repeatedly filling them in and sending them back, it&
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by NickPollard 12y ago
In Civ IV though, it's possible to get enough great merchants and then run at 0% tax rate in some kind of scientific utopia, which I presume is where silicon valley libertarians got their ideas from.

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