An Unbelievable Demo • Hacker News Board

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#291

Post by irrational » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #157

toyg wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The single most significant factor for the popularity of American accents is Hollywood.

I'd include the US music industry in that. Songs are > important for learning a language, if you're constantly surrounded by songs of a certain language. Plus... American multinationals are somewhat close behind. If you want to get a good, well paying job at an American multinational, you have to speak English at least a bit, and you have to know it well if you want to move up the ladder.

Recently we were doing interviews for a job. We had one gentleman from India applying for the position. We have hundreds of people with Indian English accents at our company, so it’s not like we are unfamiliar with the dialect. But this person… none of us could understand more than one word in ten from him. We persevered with the interview, each of us assuming that it was just us and everyone else could understand him. It took me nearly an hour to realize that he was pronouncing API as “ape-ee”.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#292

Post by nix23 » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

steego wrote: post #251

nix23 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in most country's you get sued first for illegally recording other peoples, and your proof is nothing worth because it's illegally obtained. Better make detailed notes, who said what with time and date.

Check the laws first. Some places only require one party (you the recorder) to consent.

>Some places only require one party (you the recorder) to consent

Some places...nord Korea? You the recorder have to consent?? I consent to myself that i record others without their knowledge?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#293

Post by bredren » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:23 PM UTC

mishraprince wrote: post #283

grupthink wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but did you win the Putnam?

That one reply in that flame war is still hilarious so many years later. To anyone who didn't get the reference of Putnam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

tldr;

In 2007, an academic argues with PG and others. After long exchange, academic defensively states their own achievements.

Another user challenges academic with GP question, to which academic provides unexpected affirmative response.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#294

Post by dswalter » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:23 PM UTC

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #95

thundergolfer wrote: post #16

Thankfully the "DTrace expert" didn't turn out to be Bryan Cantrill. He's a big fan of Scott McNealy's engineering principles for Sun Microsystems, which includes "Don't Cheat", and the behaviour in this story very much seems not in the spirit of that principle. I wonder if this bit of 'cheating' ended up getting someone at Sun in trouble.

You do not know.

It feels like Cantrill being a creator of DTrace earns at least the credibility to be called a 'DTrace expert' without quotation marks.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#295

Post by irrational » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

RyJones wrote: post #245

Agentlien wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Swedish and to me a heavy American accent means a clear rhotic r[0], slightly slurred speech, and a lot of volume. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English

I got that a lot in Iceland[0] recently. I’d say something to a clerk, and they’d reply with “you’re an American!” Yes, how could you tell? You’re so loud! Thanks? [0]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOgT48pM4GctCy-88GTDyyqyy...

I aware of this stereotype, so when I travel I purposefully try to talk just above a whisper.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#296

Post by smoldesu » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

OldTimeCoffee wrote: post #255

throwaway3699 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implementing software updates where you don't want to ship entire binaries again (and only the diff) would be one. In some video games the assets are also packed into massive binaries, so you don't want to ship gigabytes of data because you replaced one icon. Sadly many games do this anyway nowadays.

There are other solutions to this problem that the game industry uses. Binary diff patching is slow, incremental, involves large diffs and has the possibility of corruption. It was used back in the mid 90's (RTPatch was the big name), but really isn't used anymore because of the drawbacks. Games frequently use an override directory or file. The patch contains only the files that have changed and is loaded after the m…

To my knowledge, most developers have gone back to binary patching for obfuscation purposes. Bethesda does this now (and ID, by extension), as well as many other developers I've seen.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#297

Post by sumtechguy » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #192

mewse wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We usually don’t compress the data on disk; decompression would make loading and file access slower. Instead, we just pack the uncompressed files together (frequently using normal zip in a no-compression mode) so that we can avoid needing to ask the OS to open and close files for us or examining the contents of a directory, both of which can be kind of startlingly slow (by video game standards) on some common OSes. I…

> We usually don’t compress the data on disk; decompression would make loading and file access slower. _You_ mightn't but the last three AAA games I worked on do/did. PS5 expectes compressed files, and does HW decompression (ahem, mostly) on the fly.

I could see that keeping one big file would still be advantageous too in that environment. As a fopen on a set of small sized files plus read plus close over and over does add up. Just in cpu time and memory slack. Whereas treating it as one giant packed backing store would have advantages in speed. But at a cost of dev time. Even if you are compressing it as well could be an advantage. But I would expect there to be some spot where it crosses over from being an advantage to a disadvantage. I suspect it would be on small files/objects. But that would just be for speed. You may have to optimize for size in some cases. In the end it is usually better to build some test code and find out. Sometimes the results are what you expect. Sometimes you are spending time on things that do not matter anymore but were a big deal 20 years ago.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#298

Post by mywittyname » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

fifilura wrote: post #257

thinkindie wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did you follow up with that company to make sure they granted you recognition and money for your tools?

Recognition - yes, but money - why? It was open source. This meeting does not sound at all awkward to me if I was the sales person. To me this sounds like how lots of companies work with open source to make a business. They take some open source tools (maybe they built it themselves, maybe not), package then and maybe sell some cloud service around it or simply just support. If I was the sales person I would be delig…

Honestly, it sounds like they might have been willing to purchase a license from you to redistribute the code. Had you reached out, you may have received a few bucks and proper attribution for your work (and your work would have reached a broader audience).

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#299

Post by irrational » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #132

oblio wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-native English speaker I absolutely hate English accents where consonants absolutely disappear for no good reason. Personally I'd rather have Americans "lean heavily on the R" than act like the letter doesn't exist (rhotic vs non-rhotic). I think it's another factor why American English is more popular than British English (besides the huge economic factor, the US economy being 5x the UK one), since their pr…

The single most significant factor for the popularity of American accents is Hollywood.

My brothers and I did the ring road in Iceland a few years ago. One night we were eating dinner at a restaurant in a small village in North Iceland. Our server had a perfect North USA dialect of English. He sounded to us just like an American. We asked him if he had lived in the USA. He said he had never left his village and had never even been to Reykjavík. We asked him how he came to speak American English so perfectly and he said he learned it from watching movies and TV shows.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#300

Post by abruzzi » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

hnmullany wrote: post #286

To be honest, Sun's whole culture treated software as an afterthought - which is part of the reason they ended up where they did

they also (in my limited experience) treated sales as an afterthought. Its the only time I've contacted a company to inquire about a product, and had them actively dissuade me from buying the product (IAM).