To build a keyboard.
/r/mechaniclekeyboards has been a great resource
Ask HN: What are you learning?
611–620 of 906 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?
#612I'm finally getting around to building a game, I've always been fascinated with paradox style grand strategy games and logistics and management games like openttd.
Speaking with some friends, they encouraged me to give it a go, but start with the goal. Which eventually translated to writing a stock market sim first.
The concept itself is a multiplayer grand strategy style game set in a fantasy style universe. I've got it working on a calendar system like a paradox game, I'm aiming for it to be running continuously with a leaderboard and periodic resets. I very much want player actions to run within the sim context, IE: The player isn't special in any significant way, they control an entity, whether that's a peep or some other in-game entity.
I have a basic demand system for my simulated people working, who buy goods they need from shops local to them and purchasing activity is reported on the market, traders trade against market activity and at present all a player can do is be a trader, running on a Clojure server which uses websockets to update the client.
There's a lot of things I want to do, I've got a map generation prototype that I built after reading some of Amit's amazing articles [1], I've been scouring my old rpg source books GM sections to try and work out what a decent set of pieces plugged together would look like, after all I figure they're supposed to create the illusion of a vibrant world for players, so why not flip through them for ideas? However I'm limiting this a bit because I don't want to get bogged down not building stuff!
I'm presently doing some initial sanity checking, basically trying to work out what are the current performance characteristics of my sim, IE: Does every entity need to be updated on every tick, does that look "nice" from a player's perspective, or create odd artefacts? Also some simple refactoring to just clean stuff up.
The other two problems to solve is keeping everything nicely organised as I really want this to get big in it's interconnected complexity (though perhaps that's a terrible idea), putting together a simple way to monitor the system's running as the game designer.
Keeping scope small and focused is hard, enthusiasm gets you to want to add all sorts of wacky stuff.
All of the above is subject to change if I figure out a better way of doing it =)...
- [1] http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...
Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?
#613How to raise a good human, be a good dad and husband. Relationships take a lot of commitment and effort. It took me a while to learn how to communicate effectively with my wife so we’re fighting problems and not each other. Babies really test your patience. They are hard to reason with so I have to keep my emotions in check and always be calm even if she is throwing a massive fit. But sometimes they really get your n…
You are not alone. I have a toddler and I am going through exact same situation. I can totally relate what you said. It's very hard, but I think slowly we learn to navigate it.
Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?
#614I'm working through Aluffi's Algebra: Chapter Zero , which covers abstract algebra (groups, fields, vector spaces, etc.) with category theoretic foundations. I took undergraduate algebra several years ago, and I'm really interested in category theory from a compositionality perspective, so this is a good opportunity to brush up on both topics. Aluffi is really well-written. It assumes some degree of mathematical matu…
If you don’t mind me asking, how long do you expect it will take you to go through that text?
Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?
#615I'm trying to learn to draw. I feel comfortable enough with my technical skills where I feel like I can pick up a new language or framework with relative ease, so I want to switch gears and improve my drawing and visual communication skills. I believe that any project can benefit from a compelling visual component. For now, I've been trying to start slow and just have fun; for example, telling myself to do three quic…
Learning to draw is something anyone can do and is incredibly rewarding. It activates a huge part of your brain (visual) that starts firing when you see all sorts of scenes, faces, patterns, colors in real life. Try the book "drawing on the right side of the brain". Another good one is the Bargue sculpture drawing course.
Thanks for your recommendations!
Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?
#616I am working on improving my Signal to Noise ratio. Meaning consistently how to do more and more constructive work than wasting time each day.
Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?
#617I have lost my contract as a developer and am helping a non-profit [1] streamline their operations. The organization aims to provide food and heath kits to the marginalized. We have already distributed over 600 kits and are on track to reach a 1000 in this week. Each kit is designed to support a family of 4 for 1 month. I was introduced to them by a friend who was helping them build an open platform [2], open in the…
How can I contribute on the software side?
Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?
#618I'm working through Aluffi's Algebra: Chapter Zero , which covers abstract algebra (groups, fields, vector spaces, etc.) with category theoretic foundations. I took undergraduate algebra several years ago, and I'm really interested in category theory from a compositionality perspective, so this is a good opportunity to brush up on both topics. Aluffi is really well-written. It assumes some degree of mathematical matu…
I am curious about category theory? Do you have any resources on where it can be applied?
Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?
#619High school is out so I am learning SIMD instruction sets, like AVX2 and SSE, and using these to speed up Hamming/Levenshtein distance calculations in Rust. Preliminary testing shows a 20x speedup using vectorized SIMD operations! The end goal is a full Rust library for edit distance routines. Sneak peek of the code: https://twitter.com/daniel_c0deb0t/status/124224838155819008...
You could also consider providing bioinformatics routines such as global and local sequence alignment. Under the hood they're very similar algorithms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_alignment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needleman%E2%80%93Wunsch_algor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Waterman_algorit...
Though I probably won't implement the different weighting schemes, I currently have alignment traceback and searching (allow "free shifts" for the pattern string) features.
Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?
#620I am working on improving my Signal to Noise ratio. Meaning consistently how to do more and more constructive work than wasting time each day.
How are you going about it?