Off the top of my head - I would guess advanced courses in Computer Graphics, AI, and Distributed Systems, could all be useful in video game development.

There are a few.

1. You need a work visa - it's easier to get a H1B with a MS than with a BA/BS.

2. You're interested in a Ph.D but don't want to commit and the program you're enrolling in is a genuine research-track MS program with options to continue on the Ph.D track, not just a revenue-generating postbac program.

3. There are specific graduate-level courses that you want to take or specific research with specific professors that you'd like to do as part of the Master's degree.

So I'm watching the show Silicon Valley and they keep talking about this "Weisman Score" used to measure compression efficiency. I googled to see if it's a real thing. Apparently it was not a real thing, until they created it for the show. And now it is a real thing.



http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-t...the-real-world

http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-t...sion-algorithm

Pretty cool. Imagine if some kind of breakthrough comes out of this. Crazier things have happened.

Do I understand it right, that it's just a way of measuring performance of a compression algorithm taking time to compress into account?

If so, what sort of breakthroughs are you expecting?

Most places in Europe since the path is BA->MA->PhD not skipping the MA like you can in the US.
Which also means most people get an Ma right after the BA and work after that. Straight to work after the BA is much rarer than in the US.

Reason for it in Germany at least is that we didn't have BA/MA until pretty recently but rather what was called Diplom which is essentially a one semester shorter BA+MA that wasn't split (I have one of these degrees).

You also can't get promoted in some civil servant tracks unless you have an MA. Dunno if it's true in the US as well but that would be another silly reason. You don't want to commit to a PhD but need the MA "certificate" to keep getting promoted. Lol civil servants.

The way I understand the US system the MA is intended as a specialization you get after working a while with the BA. Classic exampe would be the MBA. PhD otoh is meant for an academic career.

I don't know maybe it will inspire some new way to look at the problem, or bring smarter people into a field considered less sexy, etc.

Has anyone been tinkering around with javascript generators? http://blog.carbonfive.com/2013/12/0...-ecmascript-6/

From their promotional billing (see above), they should be something of an improvement over promises or callbacks in asynchronous situations. I started looking at replacing the parallel middleware in my framework just as an academic exercise - and no way did they seem conceptually clearer, less code, or when baked into a framework make it easier/clearer for feature devs using the framework.

Here's my parallel function that calls multiple express middleware functions in parallel (which uses next() as a promise):

I gave up trying to rewrite it with a generator when the function mushroomed into 3x it's size (admittedly I didn't spend a lot of time on it).

Even the parallel example from the blog I posted still needed to use a counter to determine when all had returned. I guess I expected something magically more elegant. Maybe express is already doing a lot of the work for me that a generator would save.

Anyway just wondering if anyone has any positive experience with generators. I noticed the Express guys have a framework called Koa that's based on generators: https://github.com/koajs/koa

I still use ES3

How do you guys save images for things like user avatars?

I have Angularjs frontend and Django REST API backend. I used to save img as a blob but the code seemed super messy, so I just switched to converting to base64 string. With a 50-line directive, img saving became as simple as saving text.

Any opinion on pros/cons? I know size won't be an issue.

only con I can think of is that serving images then requires a handler that can pull from the db or at least a cache server. If you save images as actual files you can offload them to a CDN, which might be useful for high traffic sites.

kind of fun js puzzle that came up in actual work today.

assume you have an object like:

o = {a:1, b:2, c:3};

your task is to create a mock() function taking an object as argument, and returning a new object possessing methods for each argument key. Those methods should return the value of the key. Eg:

m = mock(o);
m.a() // returns 1
m.b() // returns 2
m.c() //returns 3

this. although presumably it's a SPA app so you're only hitting the database once per session to download the image that first time, which makes it less important. also i'd consider moving the encoding logic to the server, rather than having it in a directive.

From my newb perspective, the reasoning for encoding it in the frontend is to simplify using the model (now that img is str). The code is just user.avatar for both ng-model and ng-src; it's trivial to create a user in 1 step.

Before this I was using flowjs, but that required a separate API endpoint and serializer to handle the async upload. The problem was I couldn't figure out an elegant way to associate an image with user on creation, because the image is saved to db before the user model. I basically did a 2-step user creation process.

i'd think you'd need that separate endpoint anyway. what if the user wants to edit his avatar later? also, typically in an onboarding process you want optional stuff like extra info and avatars to be something you do after the basic account creation anyway. i don't totally understand your second problem -- in your two step version why didn't you just create the user first?

Fun surprise, negotiated salary & benefits for new position, get offer letter today, 1 more week vacation mysteriously added in. Didn't have anything in writing before this anyways so uh I guess I won't be bringing that up?

Go back in there, pull out your ballsack and drop it on the table and say "This is not the vacation we agreed on. I want another week." Then point to the picture on his desk and say "Who's the c*nt?"

Speaking of vacation, suzzer what's that thing about how any time you accept a new job you should be like "oh btw, I have xxx already planned for xxx dates" and they'll often give it to you without penalizing vacation days or whatever?

Back to interviewing for the new year! I have a face-to-face (first!) coming up for data conversion and scripting. All low-level database and munging work, which will be right up my alley.

They asked me to send in a salary "suggestion." I'm not sure what to send.

Yeah I mean what choice do they have? They don't want to seem like *******s.

On one job they gave me a week vacation then didn't pay me for the rest. (Which sucked because I had no vacation forever.)

At another job they said they could only give me a week. But when it came time to not pay me for the rest it was easier for my boss to just look the other way and let them pay me. I brought it up to him twice because I didn't want to get in trouble. But when he blew it off both times I said ok and just took the $$.

"market"

"Market" is sadly ambiguous. For databases, "average" is over 90k / year, but beginners can start as low as $35k / year.

I feel like no matter what I send, it will be too high for my (lack of) background, yet so low they will laugh at me.

I don't follow you here. What specifically did you tell them and ask for, and at what point in the interview/acceptance process? I recall this was in like what, the "life tricks" thread in OOT?

Did you say you had two weeks planned for, and they let you take it but only paid for one week (in the first example)? How far in the future were those dates, and did you legit have them already booked?

I told them after they accepted me for the job. Or at least when it was close to acceptance. Just tell them you have something planned, tickets bought, etc.

One of them I worked for 1.5 weeks, then took 3.5 weeks off to go to Russia, Mongolia and China. Yes obviously I legit had that booked. That was weird walking back in to the people I barely knew after almost a month. They paid me for 2 weeks I think. But one of those weeks was a loaner which put me deep in the hole on vacation, which sucked. Lesson learned was I'd rather they just not paid me for any of it.

So, the second place I think I took two weeks off to go on a photo tour (which I already had paid for) a few months after starting. I told them I wanted to just not get paid, rather than use my 1 week of vacation. Further compounding the problem is there was no way to go in the hole on vacation. So technically I couldn't even go on the trip.

But like I said my boss just blew it off and I still got paid for the two weeks and didn't have to use my vacation. The first place was a smaller company which had no problem just not paying me. The second place was a big company where you have to pretend you have a hardship or some kind of severe injury to take any time off w/o pay.

I did have a scare a couple months later when they said my timesheets didn't match up with whatever project I was supposed to be working on (because I hadn't submitted any). I thought for sure I was going to get fired. But we just put it down to general admin. No problem.

Since then I've taken at least 50 days off in 4 years w/o having to use PTO time. But I also work crazy nights, weekends, etc. in crunch time. The bosses know this. Whether I'm there or not doesn't really affect what I have to get done.

Honestly, if I was you, I would always take these questions to mean: "Come up with a number that you think is fair"

You have been transparent that you are making somewhere in the 15-20/hr range right now. Doubling it to 40/hr=80k/yr might be a bit unrealistic for both your expectations and background as you describe it.

Go with something like 30-37/hr=60-74k/yr.