This seems like a great time to post the phenomenal Everything is a Remix [1]. Part one discusses movies, part two film, and part three discusses interfaces for computers, with special emphasis on Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Mac.
You could enhance that second point by adding some noise to the function so the difficulty isn't a smooth ramp — you get some tough monsters earlier and then maybe the next group isn't as difficult.
Right. I fuzz that on the other end in my game: the distances are calculated accurately, but the monsters are distributed semi-randomly by distance.
The basic process is:
1. Pick a random difficulty for the monster.
2. Pick n random locations for the monster and place it at the farthest one.
n is based on the monster's difficulty so stronger monsters get more chances to end up farther away. This means you can still run into really hard stuff early, it's just less common.
Definitely after. Cooking denatures the myosin and releases water; a seared steak soaking in water isn't going to have the kind of texture you'll get (and want!) from the Maillard reaction.
I guess what I mean is that it'll taste fine but the texture won't be quite there.
The worst part of R is that array indices begin at 1, and trying to get an array at 0 will fail silently by returning 0. I've spent many a night trying to figure out why all my data is wrong because my_array[0] * frame$column is returning the wrong numbers.
this gets brought up again and again with no agreement and the only advice I know how to give you is that when working in any language that has mathematics as its primary focus (mathematica, matlab, Julia, R), you use 1-index, and other languages you use 0-index.
alilja's issue isn't 1-indexing, it's R's completely insane decision to return usable numerical values for an array access error. In Mathematica or Matlab accidentally using 0-indexing would lead to obvious errors, while in R it often doesn't - especially if you have sparse/many zero data already
Not everyone measures success by money and leisure time. Especially in more creatively-derived industries, like culinary arts, I find that money has little to do with what people judge as success. Many simply want to make the best food they can.
It's true what you are saying (not everyone..) but I am not sure that there's so much creativity in 99% of the food industry. Take NaOH, he makes pretzels, using a very good recipe that he probably doesn't want to change, how much innovation can he put in that? Please note that I'm not critizing or bashing his work,not at all, I've upvoted his posts because I found them very interesting, it's just that I think that when you move to "professional" food production, at some point what you are asked is delivering with consistency, and you have less space for being creative.
I like cooking, I am not bad at it, and when I moved to this country (Luxembourg, coming from Italy) I was unemployed and so I was joking with friends saying things like "if I don't find a job I could open a restaurant" but of course it was just a joke, first of all because you should really have worked in that sector before starting to do something on your own, and second because one thing is cooking a good Risotto for your family once a week, another thing is doing it for 10 tables every single day...I think it can become quite repetitive and not enjoyable
On the food side, I agree with you about there not being much room for creativity in my setup. I'm comfortable with that. I like it, even, since coming up with new items or menus was never a part of the work I particularly enjoyed. Plus, that work complicates ordering and increases the risk of food waste. Sure, I do some of that, but not much and not on a regular basis.
Yet there is plenty of room for creativity. I focus on trying to bring that to customer service. I've worked diligently to make it so that all my customers know I will do whatever I possibly can to help them, pretzel-related or otherwise. Some things are across the board, like not requiring specific lead times for orders (in this field it can be up to 48 hours). Others are customer-specific, like getting an order at 9:15AM and delivering it by 11AM (fresh-baked goods, remember), or doing dishes for three hours because I've got time and my customer's dishwasher decided to no-show, or bringing a customer a giant 5-pound pretzel to help that group of people celebrate its first anniversary of being open.
All of that contributes to my business doing okay despite the lack of marketing on my part. People rave about the products I make, and the businesses to whom I sell are comfortable recommending me to other businesses. I mean, we all know word of mouth is the best marketing—not just for its low cost but mostly for the weight it carries—and since I’m a wholesaler my best opportunity for generating word of mouth is through customer service for the businesses buying from me. That’s an area where there’s always room for creativity since circumstances and the people involved provide diverse opportunities for me to respond well.
I love programming, and think I'd do it even if it didn't pay well, but I'm not sure you can do that forever. Most people get married, have kids and so on, and can't keep up the intensity with low pay.
Also, there's a lot to be said for creating a viable business - "working on your business, rather than in your business" as the quote goes, that can run without you.
The fact that he's just using canny suggests to me that it's just a simple hack he threw together. There are LOTS of other edge detection algorithms, but canny is pretty good and so easy to implement that it's the most generally used. It's not great at faces at a low resolution, but even just a little pre-processing can make the image better (as he demonstrates towards the bottom of the page).
Yes, 'simple hack' is definitely one reason. But there are a couple of others:
- The drawing is sent to the Arduino as a block, then drawn, so it has to fit in the Arduino's RAM. More complex drawings would require streaming the data during the drawing. That's totally possible, but it is more work.
- We quite liked the way these severely-simplified sketches came out. Because the edge-finding and vector-simplifying code is quite stupid, the best pictures tend to be the simplest ones, and doing more lines might well just make the picture more noisy.
Is it not enough to have the user run a calibration step when first using the app? I've had panorama apps do this.
Edit: Bounden has a calibration step every time you use the app, and again every time it detects too much drift. If it was a quality issue, they could just warn people that they'll get crummy results if they have crummy sensors.
Nah, I talked to the guys who develop Horizon, and the Android APIs and devices are very spotty about gyroscopes/accelerometers. Each device needs to be developed for almost separately, and the iPhone APIs are higher-quality on these things in general.
That doesn't mean you can't do it, it's just easier on the iPhone, which sucks for us Android users.
Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book. He writes not about how to make your graphs look pretty, but how to display vast quantities of data and distill them down into useful graphics that communicate themselves effectively.
He provides examples of good and bad graphs, but more importantly, explains what exactly it is that makes those examples good and bad, and further generalizes it so you understand how to make good visualizations. If you don't want to shell out the money for it, it's probably at your library (remember those?).
Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information unless you have some background or are willing to learn about it -- it tends to be highly technical and is probably too complex for what you're trying to do. Basic stats might help you, but not as much as Tufte will.
> Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book.
Agreed, its absolutely excellent. Thanks to Y Combinator for listing it in the book list.
> Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information...
Not agreed. In my opinion you might have missed what I felt was a main point of that book: Always learn the appropriate statistics required to understand the data, choose a correct visualization method to communicate those statistics effectively, and once you've understood it fully, confirmed the results, and removed all the cruft, then publish it.
What I meant was to shy away from approaches that are PURELY based on statistics if you have no background in it, because it can get overwhelming quickly.
Of course, if it's worth it to invest the time required to have a fundamental understanding of statistics, by all means do so -- but if this is a one-time or a short-term project, I'm not sure the time commitment is worth it.
For pure data visualization, Tufte is absolutely the brilliant and helps you avoid a whole raft of bad behavior that leads to sloppy, hard to understand graphics. I can't second your suggestion enough.
I would add that his one day course is a great way to get started reading his books (especially if you can get your employer to pay for it). He's a great speaker and you get all the books as part of the course. I wish all the makers of charting libraries, toolkits, and data analysis software were more familiar with his work. It would save us from some truly awful junk.
One area where I disagree with him frequently is when he strays from data visualization into user interface design. In general, I find his user interface preferences result in UI's that are too cluttered. One of his main rules is that data presentations should be very dense. However, I disagree that this approach works as well for user interfaces as it does when visualizing data. If you look at his web site (http://www.edwardtufte.com/) you can see his UI philosophy on display. I find Don Norman to be much better in this area than Tufte.
If the iPhone was going to threaten Nintendo, it would have done it already. Game Center-like backends are hardly uncommon on it. OpenFeint has been around for a long time, and it's pretty prevalent.
