From the article: "Functional testing of the isolated limbs showed that electrical stimulation of muscle fibers caused them to contract with a strength 80 percent of what would be seen in newborn animals. "
The most realistic virtual reality I have ever participated in was the Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE). There is a program that simulates a kitchen. There are cereal boxes, silverware, etc that you can pick up and even throw across the room. When I opened the refrigerator door, I instinctively moved my body out of the way. The crazy thing is that it's not even the best tech out there. The resolution was crappy and the physics were a little bit off. But if you stopped actively paying attention to the details, even for just a moment, it was enough to make some part of your brain think it's real. VR doesn't have to much better (if at all) in order to be really immersive.
If you're at Duke or somewhere nearby I highly recommend checking it out. They have visiting hours fairly frequently. http://virtualreality.duke.edu/
I've tried the Oculus DK1 but not the DK2. They are similar in terms of resolution and tracking accuracy. There are two main differences. The DiVE is a cube-shaped room with six projected walls. So you can fit multiple people into the simulation at once (only one person gets head tracking and the proper perspective). The DiVE also had a "wand" which you could use to interact with your environment. I would bet there are similar peripherals for use with an Oculus Rift, but I haven't tried them.
If anyone is "cheating" by setting their color to the background color, you can set Game.prototype.backgroundColor to something else in the console. Also a way to see yourself if you are the one cheating ;)
I am worried that there might be a dangerous trend in conversations about go on HN recently. There seems to be a tendency toward ad hominem comments against the go authors.
The article itself is a great read. I love hearing interesting and honest commentary about the language. But I wonder if comments like "for reasons that appear to be political, does not have integer Min and integer Max functions" are appropriate. Later the author mentions "I get a similar sense of refusal-to-engage — the authors are communicative, to be sure, but in a didactic way." If the go community (or the programming community at large) truly has the sense that the go authors are unwilling to engage with the users of the language, then that's a big problem. However, are these sort of off the cuff comments the right way to start a discussion about it? At the very least, I wish that the author would provide specific evidence for these claims. I'm sure that there is some justification for them, but what the author is telling us is his inference, and I would appreciate an opportunity to read the source material and decide for myself. FWIW I have been programming in go for 2.5 years and made a few trips to the go-nuts mailing list. I don't share the author's impression, but I also haven't read every thread on the mailing list.
That's far from the worst of it, of course. I have read comments calling the go authors arrogant, ignorant, or conceited. If you insist on criticizing the go authors, I would hope that you could at least keep it professional and provide a link to some comment/literature to back up your criticism.
I welcome criticism of go, or of any topic for that matter. I just want to avoid unfair characterization and irrelevant ad hominem comments. Am I being too defensive or do other people share this concern?
> However, are these sort of off the cuff comments the right way to start a discussion about it?
Well it is a persons' opinion. There are some facts, some humor, some personal opinions. I am not sure the author planned on being on the front page of HN. I don't think he submitted his own article. It is up to the readers to put things in the appropriate "bins" so to speak -- "This is good advice", "I don't like this part", "This is just a personal attack" and so on. Sometimes the same article can contain a variety of things.
I agree with you about gopherjs being an awesome project. And I would love to see a playground-like debugger that you could run directly in your browser for quick debugging!
From the SpaceX twitter account: "After Dragon and Falcon 9’s second stage are on their way to orbit, the first stage will execute a controlled reentry through Earth’s atmosphere, targeting touchdown on an autonomous spaceport drone ship approximately nine minutes after launch." So it sounds like if you stay tuned for nine minutes after the launch you can see the booster stage attempt to land!
> My hope is that the next client-side MVC/MVVC/etc. framework will be written in Go from the start.
A friend and I are working on exactly that! It's called humble: https://github.com/soroushjp/humble. We took a lot of inspiration from backbone and react. Still in an experimental phase and hasn't been touched much since we built it for the Gopher Gala, but we have plans to work on it a lot more in the future. There is also https://github.com/gowade/wade.
I happen to know a few hackathon organizers and have an idea of how these things work under the hood. I wouldn't be so quick to judge. The reason Penn's hackathon is application only is that they literally can only support a certain number of participants. There's a limit to how many people they can feed, fit in one building, control in a big crowd, etc. Some hackathons manage this limit by accepting participants first come, first serve. Penn decided to take what they consider to be the best applicants, and I don't blame them for that. Their goal as organizers is to impress sponsors enough so that they can do it again next year. There's no evidence that this sort of conversation happened.
People are right in criticizing some aspects of the hackathon culture, but be careful about generalizations. For example, HackDuke has taken steps to include beginners with a series of seminars in the off-season (and by offering a beginner prize), encourage projects that do social good (as opposed to just "hacks"), and they encourage people to continue working on their projects after the hackathon is over. Disclaimer: I went to Duke and participated in their hackathons (and greatly enjoyed them!).
If you, like me, struggled through geometry class more than other math classes, or if you never managed to memorize the relationship between pi and sin/cos/tan, you should watch this. Personally, I think that tau is far more intuitive. If I could go back, I would probably use tau for all my math/physics classes and simply do the conversion tau = 2pi as needed.
So I found one of these in my city. The Dead Drops homepage has a list of all known locations: https://deaddrops.com/. Took a while to find the exact spot, and when I plugged in... nothing. The drive was completely exposed to the elements without much protection, so it was rusty and as far as I could tell useless. I have a hunch that most of them suffered similar fates.
