Splines

Here's an open question that I'm having a hard time finding an answer for:

I have a series of images that are basically screenshots of a visual novel (pretty much a comic book). Most of the space of the screenshots are identical from image to image, and I'd like to compress these files together to save space. My first thought is to use some kind of video compression format to do this, but I'm wondering how to handle playback (currently the windows built in image viewer is used).

Backstory: My wife enjoys reading VNs on her phone and screenshots them so she can re-read them on the PC. I've automated most of the capturing of screenshots via some adb scripting and a WPF app that talks to the phone, but the resulting files are quite large and I can tell that I could be smarter with how the resulting files are stored.

> If you follow the right folks on Twitter, you'll get to overhear a lot of conversations about the important issues in Python, R, or what have you, and gain a context that eludes most people who learn programming languages from books.

I've tried this a few times, but discoverability on Twitter is impossible. I don't know who's an authority, digging through someone's past posts is hard, following a discussion is really difficult. It feels like I'm tasked with digging through a SMS chat log looking for content. Am I just doing it wrong? I can't keep up with twitter. I follow 20-30 accounts and inevitably every time I open up the app and there's 600+ unread posts. I couldn't imagine following any more than that.

Getting into the enterprise business smashes any remaining cultural whimsy.

I agree with the article, at least in that our values and beliefs end up embedded in the examples (e.g., all the emp/dept examples).

You need to use some kind of data to help the reader, an abstract concept isn't going to work.

I do disagree with the author in that pushing a political viewpoint in an example is in poor taste and makes understanding the example difficult for readers unfamiliar with any jargon.

Maybe examples that draw from nature (e.g., taxonomy hierarchy) or the humanities (e.g., cataloging a library) would be different enough to be refreshing and less... capitalistic.

Chromecasts are a non-starter for families with children. How are they supposed to stream to the TV when they don't have a phone?

> When you say "I would leave immediately", you do mean that you would physically intervene to remove your child, correct? Doing this at 2 years is pretty easy; you can just pick them up and leave. How do you do it at 6 years (50 lbs, 42")? Do you try at 10 years? How do you "leave immediately" with an older child if they physically resist?

This is tougher, and really I can only offer my own experience and thoughts. For context, I have a 9yo and a 18yo. I don't actually recall needing to intervene with any of them engaging in full-on temper tantrum mode. At their worst, usually pulling them aside, explaining their behaviour is not appropriate, and staying with them with the idea that when they're ready to behave correctly we can resume whatever it was we're doing is enough. Often it would be something that we could talk about together and reflect on their feelings. Depending on their age, if they're very young it's the kind of thing that can happen, and maybe some time out together is enough. If they get older and are still having this kind of behaviour then maybe you do need to leave for the day.

My youngest will often talk to me at bedtime about how she felt about certain things that happened that day. For example, if she yelled at me that day I'll bring it up and we can talk about how she felt, how that made me feel, and how to deal with it in the future. More commonly it's about something that happened at school that day.

> If you transition from physical to physiological intervention at a later year, what sort of practice will you and your children have had will make this likely to succeed? If you could make that transition (away from physical manipulation) earlier, is there a reason to wait?

IMO (and I'm just a random person with no training, so don't take this as actual advice), parenting succeeds when expectations are clear, consequences are not arbitrary and promises are kept. If you say X is going to happen when they do Y, then you better follow through. Whether X is a punishment or a reward, it doesn't matter. Trust is what probably makes it easier to transition to you using words to de-escalate situations. At a very young age children just can't remember or understand your reaction to their behaviour, and it takes time for them to learn that.

All that said, it's been awhile since I've needed to deal with children throwing a temper tantrum, so I've probably left a lot out. All I can say is that at my kids' age today I don't need to deal with this problem. Sure, sometimes they're disappointed at not getting what they want. We can talk about it and if they feel they're not being treated fairly we can usually come to some sort of compromise.

There's two parts here: a.) What would I do, as the parent, if my child were to throw a tantrum, and b.) How would I react, as a parent, to another child throwing a tantrum.

For A: As stated, I would leave immediately. I'll hedge that a bit and say that getting to the point where a child is rolling around on the ground is a failure for everyone concerned, so ideally we'd never reach this point in the first place. If there's a disagreement, my kids and I can talk it out without resorting to a tantrum.

For B: I don't care what you do with your kids. In public at a zoo in an open area, have at it. It's a tough situation all around and I'm not going to make another parent's day worse by saying anything.

> is that the tantrum isn't shameful or "wrong," it just is.

Wait.. it is wrong. If we don't get something that we want, we don't throw a tantrum. Yes, it is an emotional reaction, and it's one that isn't acceptable.

I'm not a perfect parent, but IMO if I were in GP's shoes, I'd leave immediately. Throwing a tantrum is not acceptable, and the consequence has to be immediate and clear. That's my boundary.

> Is it okay to make end users addicted to your services?

How much of a moat does uber really have? It seems to be only made of money - there is nothing inherent in their product that makes it sticky, only "is this the cheapest ride right now?".

They don't necessarily know that. Imagine you've used this FB feature in the past. You get a mail from @facebookrnail.com that tells you you can just email them the photos without even opening the app now! Well isn't that convenient.

Now, it's fair to say that even in a technically safer implementation where the photos never leave the device, many users can't tell the difference, so this point doesn't hold a lot of water.

Still, I think making the uploading of scandalous photos to FB is a dangerous precedent to set in general. Will other services and startups that have users suffer from the same problem implement this feature in the same way, and guarantee user safety and privacy? That's a pretty high bar.

> Before we reduce this to a slippery slope, what scenario do you envision in which FB could coax its userbase to upload nude photos? I know the OP is about taking a selfie to prove existence. What would FB use as the basis to mandate the general user to send a self-nude?

Phishing attacks against users that this feature is supposed to protect are more likely to succeed.

The attack against the uploaded hash approach fails with default-deny, which seems like a good thing for users.

The current implementation can be attacked by uploading thousands of legitimate images delaying takedown requests - therefore any images that should be taken down will stay up longer.

I'll agree that whatever approach FB is doing to hash the photos may not work on a phone for technical reasons, but given FB's resources I'm not sure how far that argument really goes. But consider this - if you truly, deeply cared about user safety and privacy, would you implement this feature the same way?

I disagree:

- It sets a precedent for uploading nude photos to FB and for them asking for it.

- You need to trust FB to delete the photos when they receive it. Yes, I understand that they probably will, but really, how many systems are those bits going to touch? How many logs are going to have this information? Can you be really sure?

A better implementation would be for the FB client to hash the file and for the hash to be uploaded. Trust issues are still there but at least mitigated to devices that you have some control over.

Evil users that hash legitimate photos can be overcome with the same review system that is being tested today.

I've always wondered if it were possible to express legal things via code. I imagine that there's a lot of ambiguity that needs "filling in" by a human, but there must be some set of legal arguments that can be literally codified.

Being able to run test cases through such a construct would be immensely useful - for example, how would changes to health care law impact someone? They could have unit tests that compare different outcomes and make it easier to understand how a new law would change things. People could ask very precise questions about how things would impact them.

Are there any easy to use self-hosting packages for this kind of thing? There's also http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/ that is this thing turned into a service. I'd like to use these things but would like something I have more control over.

Do you manually kill all browser processes? It's certainly plausible that there's a zombie process around so any singleton-thing that does cleanup on last process exit never got a chance to run.

I don't understand people in this thread defending Apple when AOSP is clearly more open. Yes, Apple has done well so far, but at the end of the day what are you going to trust? A talking head, or the actual code running on your device? It smells of rationalization for anyone to say that it would not be in Apple's interest to collect personal information.

It seems like its more than that:

> The progressive clinical presentation of this patient during the prior 24-48 hours, including symptoms of somnolence, lethargy, irritability, nausea, seizure and respiratory depression are consistent with previously documented, known complications of recent cannabis exposure in the pediatric population.

Their source is here: https://alanflashman.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/piis0196064...

Those symptoms are consistent with exposure - it's too bad the case report didn't include any data from the parents (maybe I missed that).

> And from personal experience its much easier and more fun than you could dare to expect.

Honestly curious - how is this fun? I try to eat less meat for a personal medical reason and finding non-meat dishes is a hassle, and at some restaurants it's impossible.

> The performance test has a reasonable amount of noise. At first, 10% of test runs fail it, and people just rerun them. Eventually 90% of test runs fail, and people need to start dealing with it, but the effort required to get it all the way back down to 10% is unrealistic for any one person.

This is a tricky thing to deal with - (imo, again) how you deal with this is twofold:

1.) The automated test that measures performance needs to be rock solid - whatever you measure needs to be deterministic. Wall-clock time isn't always the way to go (although it's the easiest), maybe you profile and measure cpu cycles consumed by your application.

2.) If you capture performance over time then hopefully you can capture a trend-line that shows performance degrading from other changes that push the app past the performance bar. If your dev loop is fast enough you can isolate performance degradations to a small set of changes. Ideally if you handle #1 above this won't be much of an issue. In my experience changes that tank performance usually do so beyond the threshold of noise.

Regarding "newbie developer needs to learn all about performance" and "asking developers to delete code", that's why you need organizational buy-off. If your changes are regressing performance in a core area that is complex with a lot of legacy, maybe you shouldn't be making changes there, or the org needs to be aware of and sign off on letting your change go through. It doesn't always need to be a hard and fast "reject all changes", but there needs to be a discussion.

Performance is usually death by a thousand cuts, and (imo) the best way of mitigating this is by standardizing some measurements and making that automated. Block changes that move performance past this bar, make sure the organization buys off on this approach. Any changes to a critical area that impact performance need to be zero-sum - if you add something, you need to take something away.

Honestly curious - does the US spread propaganda to the rest of the world? If I had to guess it would be that hollywood historically did most of the work - exporting "American" values and culture to other nations, but I don't know if that's still the case.

Anyways, it would be interesting to know if there is any kind of US presence on Chinese/Russian social networks (like, is there some bizarro mirror world /r/the_donald in Russian with posts pushing some kind of US agenda?)

How's the performance on it? I tried it recently and found it pretty unsatisfactory. Maybe it was the media - I read somewhere that if the file needs transcoding it's all in software.

I feel like Snapchat is aging out of coolness and there's nothing they can do about it. First adopters are in the workforce and probably starting families by now. Do kids want to be on the same social media platform their uncle or aunt are posting baby pictures on?

Ugh, that's a really disturbing strategy. Is this a common tactic for freemium games? I've seen "daily login rewards" type things which give you an incentive to play daily, but I've never before seen something that is an actual punishment for not playing.

I suppose "lingots" don't really have a monetary value, but imagine this tactic done in a game where the currency is worth some amount of actual money.

please drink a verification can

I've only visited a few times, and someone local could probably give a better idea of how the area is, but my impression of downtown Toronto was that while it is car-accessible it is also very pedestrian friendly. Lots of sidewalk and mass transit options and a downtown that has locals walking around at night (versus emptying out when everybody goes home at the end of the office day).

A little OT, but personally I'm tired of hearing the term "growth mindset". It's a business buzzword that has become as meaningless as the inspirational posters of the 80's and the "hang in there" cat of the 70's.

I have children and I try to praise their effort and encourage them as much as possible. I do not ask them if they have a "growth mindset".

(Apologies to parent - I'm just venting)

Do you really press every possible key down almost to the switch point, and then when you want to actuate the key, press it a tiny bit further?

I would guess (and maybe I'm wrong about this) that you rest your fingers on the keycaps, and press them in as far as needed to actuate, but no further. The key still needs to travel.

It's like CGI in movies - when it's done well you don't realize that it's being done at all.

I don't know how much I buy (!) this explanation - if an overqualified engineer is applying for a role that is below their usual expectations, it's probably because they can't find something that is a better match for whatever reason. If they are going to up and leave to a high paying job "easily", they would have done so already.