lunaticlabs · HackerTrans

lunaticlabs

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hace 2 mesesdiscuss

It’s a cool building. I got the privilege of being part of a hackathon that was run out of the building after it was no longer in use. I had a startup making a laser tag style game of assassin with cell phones, and I got to stay up all night with a bunch of college kids playing assassin in the building. Got to wander around to off limits areas and read white board graffiti from the last departing employees. It’s a the kind of office space I’ve only dreamed about working in.

hace 6 mesesdiscuss

What is probably happening, based on my own experience inside companies doing hiring, is that we generally get flooded with CVs anytime we put up a job listing, and most of them are irrelevant. To help manage the flow of applicants, we use recruiters and HR people to filter the resumes. Since they don’t know how to evaluate engineers, inevitably they filter CVs by the somewhat arbitrary criteria that is in the job listing.

My recommendation for you, when you see a job listing, is to investigate the company and project, try and find people on the responsible teams, and see if you can network or reach out to them directly. This often will get you past the arbitrary screening that is setup, and they’re much more likely to be able to judge you on your merits and not whether you meet some arbitrary filtering goal. The first pass in hiring is always a fast rejection pass, and is rarely one that is looking for qualified people, just one that is trying to get the flow of applicants down to a manageable level.

hace 7 mesesdiscuss

As a non-German living in Germany, the German insistence on you buying your kitchen in a rental is really really stupid, and serves no purpose. Besides the schemes listed here, where the landlord tries to sell you the previous kitchen at full price, the old renter will do it too. If they're having you take over their contract, they have some choice in who the renter is, and will often condition their acceptance of your rental offer on taking their kitchen at full price or more. If you don't want it, someone else desperate will take it. There's also a robust marketplace of second hand kitchen appliances on FB marketplace, where the tenants tried to do the same thing or just generally got stuck with taking their kitchen, and now are trying to unload appliances that don't fit the new place. In Germany, its not just fridges. It's also the stove/oven combo sometimes, the dishwasher, and the lights and lightbulbs. It's a horrible inefficient system that just makes renting a nightmare, and keeps everyone in place because of the enormous hassle of moving (the standard 90 day notice period doesn't help either. Trying to line up a new lease and old one ending without significant overlap is also next to impossible. The German rental market is broken).

hace 7 mesesdiscuss

The big advantage of macs when it comes to GPUs isn't their direct speed, its the unified memory model. If I want to buy a GPU that has 64-128GB of addressable memory, it will cost me an enormous amount and the computer itself will be a server module for racks that is loud and not a consumer PC. You can buy a mac with a unified memory model, and even though its GPU is not on the top rankings, the fact that it can operate on your model in regular memory is what gives it its advantages.

hace 7 mesesdiscuss

As a video game programmer, I can speak to this. For video games, we generally need geometry. Flat planes, things you can collide against, things we can reason about. Gaussian splats work as a bunch of 2D images stuck on top of each other, that in combination look correct. This is great for rendering, but makes it very very difficult/impossible to figure out whether you are inside some geometry or not, because it doesn't have any. it doesn't give you any way to reason about it as solid geometry. So in the end, you have to create the geometry that is the solid surfaces that you will collide against and move around in, and gaussian splats would be independent of that. Once you have all the geometry, its much easier to just render that.

There are tools that will generate geometry from splats, but its generally not very good, and gives messy results. Fixing the messiness is often more work than just re-doing it from scratch. This is another incredibly difficult problem that hasn't been solved particularly well.

hace 11 mesesdiscuss

I'm also from Helsinki, and I lived in Chicago, and I can tell you that Chicago gets MUCH colder than Helsinki does. Chicago regularly gets to -10-20C each winter, for weeks on end (or at least used to, I no longer live there), with winds and snow to match. Helsinki rarely gets that cold, and doesn't stay there for long periods. The darkness in Helsinki is brutal, but Chicago winters are nothing to sneeze at.

hace 11 mesesdiscuss

The industry has those roles now, and I know people in them. They're not wide spread, but they do exist and I do work in games. This is something that has come as the industry has matured.

hace 12 mesesdiscuss

Holy shit! I ran into this growing up in California. Would have been early 1990s. I have long been bitter that I had taken algebra in 8th grade, and starting high school in 9th grade they made me take algebra again because I was told I couldn’t skip ahead that far. I was too young to be in the class. For the record, I’m white snd middle class, so don’t fit that pattern, but I am neuro diverse. Anyhow, everyone has excused it at the time with shit like it must have been a technicality, or that the algebra was more advanced, or something along those lines. Anyhow, it’s nice to be validated sometimes, and this is one of those times so I thought I’d share.

el año pasadodiscuss

Also in Germany edibles aren’t legal, so we are stuck with smoking or self baking

el año pasadodiscuss

Not anymore! These are allowed at least in the UK and in Germany (where I reside) now. It was not the case when I first moved here a few years ago, but read about how they're within code now. The problem I have is that they're not actually available anywhere that I've seen, and I doubt I'll find a plumber easily who will install one.

el año pasadodiscuss

I was fluent in 3 languages before school, as is my little brother. Parents from 2 different countries, and moved to America when I was a young child and my brother was born in the USA. It helps if the parents can communicate to each other in their native tongues (like my parents). Of all the 2+ language families I knew growing up, the children generally only learned their parents' native language if both parents either had the same native language, or if both parents were able to speak both native languages. Also thoroughly anecdotal.

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Helicopters also glide, it’s called auto rotation. Helicopters can also land in much more confined spaces than airplanes, even with an auto rotation. As we helicopter pilots like to say, if an airplane engine quits, you just know you’re going to die for a long time unless you’re near an airport. All I need in a helicopter is a small area to set it down in. Source: I fly helicopters

hace 2 añosdiscuss

I also love my XM5s, but yeah, the touchpad is useless and far too sensitive. I kept accidentally touching it whenever I move my hair out of my face to tuck it behind my ears, or otherwise brush past it. I also turned mine off, and its stayed that way.

hace 2 añosdiscuss

I moved to Germany from the US, and broadly speaking (I have my own issues with German policies and politics) I like the system here better. In Germany, outside of being a “public” figure, you own the rights to your own image. Without explicit consent and compensation, you are not allowed to distribute photos of anyone. There are specific carve outs for notable events (if you are incidentally in a shot for something else, it doesn’t count), but otherwise seems notably reasonable to me. It definitely seemed odd when I first moved here, but seeing it in practice it seems fine.

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Multiple times in my game development career have implemented or worked with proprietary byte code in a project. I've done it on PCs, embedded devices, consoles, etc. The first game I worked on used MDL from the old Infocom days.

hace 2 añosdiscuss

As both a US and EU citizen who lives in the EU, I actually run into issues with this. I book my flight with my US with my US passport, and it's a round trip, so it ends up with the same passport registered. I go through the EU line upon entering the EU, but they consistently also ask me for my US passport. This hasn't happened on the automated kiosks for whatever reason.

hace 2 añosdiscuss

That actually happened in real life too. Look up the North Hollywood bank shootout. I remember being at work watching it happen live on TV (I lived in LA at the time, but was not near the shootout, this was the era of live helicopter footage of everything).

hace 2 añosdiscuss

I've been a manager in software development on and off for the last 20 years now, and to echo what many of the more experienced managers here say, interviews at best give you some negative signals, but very rarely anything that I would consider a hugely positive signal. At best, I've quite gotten along with a charismatic candidate, but in my own career, even this has little correlation to people that I liked actually working with.

That being said, I think that a candidate's work history and general questions is good enough. In my experience, it's been painfully obvious everytime someone is bullshitting (or at least I think so, I never hired those people), and I haven't had any experiences where I've hired anyone directly that was a true disaster. Of all the people I've managed, I've had to fire very few, and in the cases that I did it was entirely unacceptable office behavior that led to the dismissal, and it also should not have been a surprise to anyone involved.

That isn't to say everyone worked out perfectly every time, but as a manager, I've been able to address most of those situations (and in the cases where I couldn't, it ended up being some of the very few dismissals). Approaching people who work with me with the benefit of the doubt has broadly been more successful. I address problems as something I want to help people fix, and not as something to be punished. Of the 50 or so people I've directly managed at this point, there's only a handful I wouldn't work with again.

hace 2 añosdiscuss

I worked and continue to work in the video game industry, and I started in 1994. In my industry, the norm is not to leave mid project, and so job hopping frequency correlates directly to project length. My first couple jobs were about a year a piece, and that wasn’t unusual for the time. Those stretched out into 2 or 3 year gigs later as the games got bigger. Now that I work in mobile games, and live service has become a big moneymaker, this has changed. The industry is reasonably volatile, companies come and go quite a but, so job lengths of only a few years isn’t particularly frowned upon.

hace 3 añosdiscuss

As far as I know, it’s based roughly on the Hanford plant. It is in Washington, but very close to Portland, Oregon. The Hanford plant looks very similar to the one from the Simpsons.