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Want to make a great puzzle game? Get inspired by theoretical computer science.
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www.jeremykun.com
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12 years ago
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eng
Two years ago, Erik Demaine and three other researchers published a fun paper to the arXiv proving that most incarnations of classic nintendo games are NP-hard. This includes almost every Super Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, and Pokemon title. Back then I wrote a blog post summarizing the technical aspects of their work, and even gave a talk on it to a room full of curious undergraduate math majors. But while bad tech-writers tend to interpre..
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Want to make a great puzzle game? Get inspired by theoretical computer science.
-
www.jeremykun.com
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12 years ago
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eng
Two years ago, Erik Demaine and three other researchers published a fun paper to the arXiv proving that most incarnations of classic nintendo games are NP-hard. This includes almost every Super Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, and Pokemon title. Back then I wrote a blog post summarizing the technical aspects of their work, and even gave a talk on it to a room full of curious undergraduate math majors. But while bad tech-writers tend to interpre..
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On my way to San Salvador last weekend I wrote a short article titled “The Changing Landscape of Innovation”. Without any internet connection until arriving back home the following Thursday, I planned on publishing it Friday morning; however, I didn’t count on Drafts losing the note to a botched sync operation. In lieu of that article, then, as I try to work with Greg Pierce to recover it, consider this: Permalink.
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I’ve started using an approach for software project estimation that so far is proving to be fairly transparent, quick and reliable. I’ve observed that within a reasonable degree of variation, most teams seems to complete about one “user-relevant task” per developer per calendar week. There are so many theoretical holes in my argument that there’s no point trying to cover them all. The funny thing is that it seems to work fairly well in prac..
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Behavior Driven Development is best described as taking an “Outside-In” approach, meaning you define your feature from the outset and describe business value, and work your way in a small piece at a time. That being the case, I thought it’d be best to cover one stage of evolution that I’ve had over the years… from Developer Facing Acceptance Tests to Customer Facing Story Level Specifications. The Start: Developer Facing Acceptance Tests Th..
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Make and all of its flavours have been here for almost 40 years and it's a tool hard to beat for many things. There are however cases when you do not need the power of Make and are willing to trade the flexibility for something else. In case of Ninja , for its speed.
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Introduction One of the first things I learned about in Go was using an uppercase or lowercase letter as the first letter when naming a type, variable or function. It was explained that when the first letter was capitalized, the identifier was public to any piece of code that wanted to use it. When the first letter was lowercase, the identifier was private and could only be accessed within the package it was declared.
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The Kickstarter for Lemma launches on Monday! Keep an eye out, and tell your friends! Prepare yourself for tons of giant GIFs. You can click each one to watch a much faster HTML5 version (can't wait until the internet ecosystem finally lets us embed HTML5 gifs...) This week I revamped the materials... again. Check it out: It had some interesting implications for the "snake" enemy:
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Very, very cool project from Josh Worth — both technically, and as a source of perspective for how vast space really is, and how small the earth — and, by extension, we — are. Permalink.
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Nice to finally have some closure on this subject. I never got into Flappy Bird — I never even downloaded the game — but I couldn’t help but get sucked into the “discussion” — and I use that term loosely here — around the game, especially after its creator took Flappy Bird down at the peak of its popularity. I wish him good luck in the future; he has been remarkably blessed, and I have no doubt he will make good use of that good fortune. ..
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After my presentation at UKNOF on SR , Mark Townsley asked me whether I'd be interested in presenting to his class at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, around the thinking (from an ops perspective) of delivering the 5218 concept of "net positive value" through the SR technology, and how the existing protocols that are available might measure up against the criteria that 5218 gives us to consider. We managed to co-ordinate logistics, and ..
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After my presentation at UKNOF on SR , Mark Townsley asked me whether I'd be interested in presenting to his class at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, around the thinking (from an ops perspective) of delivering the 5218 concept of "net positive value" through the SR technology, and how the existing protocols that are available might measure up against the criteria that 5218 gives us to consider. We managed to co-ordinate logistics, and ..
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It's sometimes tempting to dismiss things as the next Fad or Buzzword. There's never enough time to learn everything and some things are…
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We announce a new open-source web service with a database of coordinates systems used in maps worldwide.
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Hi All, I set about to put together a new app and challenged myself to do the whole architecture on azure without spending a penny. The only caveat I set was that I should be able to scale if everything goes really well. So the basic components I’m using are: MongoDB - 500mb db offered on Azure Store by MongoLabs (having not played with mongo wanted to give it a go, you could also use SQL Azure free db or others) SendGrid - 20k emails..
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Code modularization, achieved in one way or another, is a technique a good developer must aim for because it helps keeping things small, well-tested and organized. And of course, it follows the DRY directive. So as a Node.js developer (and maybe contributor to the Open Source), creating and publishing an NPM module is one of those steps you will eventually face. Probably if any Node.js developer would have to pick an indispensable tool ....
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Back when I was first exposed to programming language design, I decided it would be really cool if there were a language that let you define your own number types and then do all your programming within those number types. And since I get excited about math, I think of really exotic number types (Boolean rings, Gaussian integers, Octonions, oh my!). I imagined it would be a language feature, so I could do something like this:
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Back when I was first exposed to programming language design, I decided it would be really cool if there were a language that let you define your own number types and then do all your programming within those number types. And since I get excited about math, I think of really exotic number types (Boolean rings, Gaussian integers, Octonions, oh my!). I imagined it would be a language feature, so I could do something like this:
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Back when I was first exposed to programming language design, I decided it would be really cool if there were a language that let you define your own number types and then do all your programming within those number types. And since I get excited about math, I think of really exotic number types (Boolean rings, Gaussian integers, Octonions, oh my!). I imagined it would be a language feature, so I could do something like this:
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So I was recently scheduled to do an AirPair pair programming session to help someone understand the various javascript functions available for asynchronous programming. This topic is key to writing correct code both in node.js and the browser, but it is indeed easy to see how things can be quite confusing when first encountering a myriad of functions that all seem to basically do the same thing. setTimeout, setImmediate, process.next....
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Algorithm: Recognizing URLs within plain text, and displaying them as clickable links in HTML, in Wicket
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www.databasesandlife.com
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12 years ago
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eng
I have just, out of necessity for a customer project, written code which takes user-entered plain text, and creates out of that HTML with URLs marked up as clickable links. Although marking up links in user-entered text is standard functionality, Stack Overflow would have you believe that it’s not something that should not be attempted, as it cannot be done perfectly. This is technically correct, however, users are accustomed to softwar..
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1. What is a Java program? a) A collection of classes b) A collection of objects talking to other objects by invoking each others methods c) A template that describes the kinds of state and behavior that objects of its type support 2. Java components are: a) types b) classes c) variables d) objects e) instances f) methods 3. What is inheritance? a) Code defined in one class can not be reused in other classes ..
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I’m excited to announce that SoundCloud is sponsoring the development of CocoaPods through a Travis Foundation grant. CocoaPods is an open…
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I’m excited to announce that SoundCloud is sponsoring the development of CocoaPods through a Travis Foundation grant. CocoaPods is an open…
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This week I finished what will probably be the last map in the Kickstarter demo. It teaches the player about the "extended wall-run" ability, demonstrated here: Normally, you hold Shift to wall-run. Now you can just keep holding Shift after you run out of wall, and you'll keep going. I also fixed the water bugs from last week, so it looks much better now: I've been worried that I don't have time in the demo to introduce eve..
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Introduction As I improve my knowledge and framework for a Go based web service I am building, I continue to go back and enhance my Beego Sample App . Something I just added recently was providing localized messages for validation errors. I was fortunate to find Nick Snyder's go-i18n package. Nick's package made it easy to support multiple languages for the Go web service I am writing. Abstracting go-i18n The go-i18n packa....
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When I first came to University lots of people (like Rob Miles ) were trying to get undergraduates to start blogging. On the 6th of March 2012 I registered this domain and started blogging, getting myself added to the awesome Hull Compsci blogs syndicate. That was two years ago and a lot has changed...
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When I first came to University lots of people (like Rob Miles ) were trying to get undergraduates to start blogging. On the 6th of March 2012 I registered this domain and started blogging, getting myself added to the awesome Hull Compsci blogs syndicate. That was two years ago and a lot has changed...
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So I’ve recently been using lots of VM’s and I end up getting through them fairly quickly – deleting and creating them regularly. What I ended up with was loads of ghost services in the portal that were, once upon a time, associated with a VM in the distant past. Given PowerShell is awesome, I set about automating the removal of these using the azure cmdlts. The trick is that I don’t want to remove services or VM’s that are currently “S..
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Here are the slides of some of my previous presentations (that I haven’t made public yet, other than delivering these at conferences and training sessions): Scripts and Tools That Make Your Life Easier and Help to Troubleshoot Better: I delivered this presentation at the Hotsos Symposium Training Day in year 2010: Troubleshooting Complex Performance Issues – Part1:
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Here are the slides of some of my previous presentations (that I haven’t made public yet, other than delivering these at conferences and training sessions): Scripts and Tools That Make Your Life Easier and Help to Troubleshoot Better: I delivered this presentation at the Hotsos Symposium Training Day in year 2010: Troubleshooting Complex Performance Issues – Part1:
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Lets Start With What the USD is backed by The USD is no longer backed by gold 1 , but by a promise that the US Government will pay its debt (in the form of payment the interest on (and sometime redeem) government securities when due). If these payments are not made to the debt holders (Corporations, China, treasury-bond holders) then a default would occur, which would shift international use of the USD into other currencies. This would f....
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