Hacker News Reader

bl0bon Things you're allowed to do (2020)

It seems to me that if everyone did this (didn't pay the meter and just eat the cost of the tickets from time to time), the city would eventually realize it and would just ramp up enforcement and make bank for a while until people started paying the meters again. So LAZ Parking would end up getting their cut again and the city would be making no less than they are now.

As a side note, I've always thought that the categorical imperative is as good of a rule to follow as any. But sometimes the 'if literally everyone behaved this way' thought experiment can get pretty silly, not to mention impossible to actually determine what would happen in such a case.

bl0bon Can synthetic data help train your AI model?

Synthetic data was used to train the pose estimation model that shipped with the microsoft kinect [0].

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

bl0bon The United States Digital Corps

Reminds me of the PJ O'Rourke quote: "The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

bl0bon Rules of Card Games: I Doubt It (1998)

Great game! My family calls it nerts.

bl0bon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2022)

Location: Colorado

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C++,C,CUDA,OpenCL,OpenGL,python

Resume: On request

Email: carsonmswope at gmail

Most of my professional experience (5+ years) is in web development, but I'm looking for GPGPU, ML, graphics and/or computer vision work. I work hard and get a lot done. Check out my side project: https://www.3d-beats.com

bl0bon Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)

Don't forget DJ Screw with chopped and screwed! Nowadays when people copy that style it is referred to as 'slowed and throwed'

bl0bon Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

https://www.3d-beats.com

Depth-camera powered MIDI drum kit. This has been my labor of love for the last several years. The current iteration runs on randomized decision forests trained to identify pixels as different parts of the hand.

bl0bon Show HN: Angularis – like Tetris, but based on triangles

Cool game! Super simple and I like the added challenge.

bl0bon Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

Does windows handle it alright when the hardware (motherboard/cpu) it's running on changes out from under it?

bl0bon Show HN: CandyGraph, a flexible, fast-by-default WebGL plotting library

This looks like a really cool library!

Perhaps a few more examples of realtime interaction/animation on large-ish datasets would help show how fast and snappy it can be?

bl0bon Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

Jeez I know all that and support this move by NVIDIA. Fuck the miners for all I care, I thought I said as much in my original post.

I just don't think they're 'infringing on my freedoms' or whatever.

bl0bon Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

Could you explain how you see crypto miners as infringing on other's freedoms?

I certainly agree with your first sentence, and think NVIDIA crippling hash rates on their GPUs is the lesser of two evils - just because I think crypto miners are a) wasting massive amounts of electricity and b) messing up prices in the GPU market.

bl0bon Framework Laptop pre-orders are open, starting at $999

FYI you probably already know this, but I get a 500 server error attempting to access https://frame.work/products/laptop

bl0bon I was terrible at crosswords so I built an AI to do them

In the US, at least (TIL there's a different style across the pond, so fun), a 'pun-based' clue like that would need a question mark at the end of the clue.

Additionally, I would say that that, because the answer isn't a coherent standalone word/phrase, that particular clue/answer combo would only be found in a puzzle as part of a hidden theme shared by a number of 'special clues' throughout the crossword, with some kind of rule uniting the answers (add 'ne' to the end of a common phrase, for example).

bl0bon Show HN: The game where you test your offside decision-making skills against VAR

I think the problem is that VAR for offsides errs only in the direction of call-things-offsides-that-shouldn't-be. I can't think of a time where it gave a goal that I though should have been called back, but so many times was a goal called back that seems like it shouldn't have.

bl0bon Show HN: The game where you test your offside decision-making skills against VAR

Love it. It's pretty much always: I thinks onside, VAR says offside.

bl0bon Show HN: The game where you test your offside decision-making skills against VAR

I agree entirely.

At least the VAR people should admit that there is an inherent margin of error in the technology (camera framerate, image resolution, blur..), and offsides calls should only be made when the result is outside that (somehow quantified) margin of error.

bl0bon Ask HN: What are you working on?

Depth camera based MIDI instrument: https://www.3d-beats.com

bl0bon Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump

I learned on HN some time ago that:

> "May you live in interesting times" is an English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. While seemingly a blessing, the expression is normally used ironically; life is better in "uninteresting times" of peace and tranquility than in "interesting" ones, which are usually times of trouble. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...

bl0bon The Code It Yourself Manifesto (2016)

Just as a quippy counterpoint (without engaging with GPs actual argument), I would say that as I've became more experienced as a developer, the more I've realized how much of a liability my own code is (and that using libraries allows me to write less code).

bl0bon Hubble Captures Crisp New Image of Jupiter and Europa

Am I missing something, or is 1663x1663 the best resolution available?

bl0bon Ultra Safe Nuclear

Random renewable energy-related question that I've been thinking about:

Specifically wrt solar, a big argument against is that it can't provide power during the night and we don't have a good way to store energy. What I'm wondering is why it's so imperative that residential/commercial properties are able to get full power from the grid 24/7? What if prices for power go way up during the night (because it can't come from solar), and people could just learn to get most of their power from the grid during the day? And have a relatively small per-house battery that charges during the day and can be used at night.

bl0bon Rideshare operations are being suspended in California

(Quote from character Lester Freamon from The Wire)

bl0bon Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor

Depends on the application. Your brain can notice the delay when playing something like digital drums after ~10-15 ms. Something with less 'attack' like guitar has a bit more wiggle room, and ambient synths even more so.

edit: also, vocals are most latency-sensitive if you are the one singing and hearing it played back at the same time.

bl0bon Atlas: End-to-End 3D Scene Reconstruction from Posed Images

Looks awesome. Given it takes position data along with images, how accurate must the position data be? Could it handle something like sensor drift in the position data over time?

bl0bon 'Music is as good as gold or oil': A man spending billions on old hits

What if you have an excellent idea but don't have any money with which to 'secure' it? Or is that more something a patent is meant to handle.

bl0bon Unlearn rotation matrices as rotations

It is usually used to create a matrix for the camera orientation given a) the camera position in XYZ coordinates, b) a point the camera is looking at in XYZ coordinates, and c) the direction of 'up' in the world (otherwise the camera would be able to spin freely along it's Z axis while still satisfying the 'look at point A from point B' requirement). You build up the 3 axes of the camera orientation step-by-step. The 3 axes can then be plugged directly into the transformation matrix, and voila.

When I was learning 3D graphics, I found this site an excellent resource. Here is the page with a more in-depth explanation of the 'look at' function:

https://learnopengl.com/Getting-started/Camera

bl0bon How a Kalman filter works, in pictures

Great article. I've been trying to grok the Kalman filter for a while now, definitely seems to have clicked a little more this time. BTW if the author sees this the link at the bottom 'Some credit and referral should be given to...' seems to be broken.

bl0bon Can Our Ballots Be Both Secret and Secure?

I'm under the impression that computerized voting systems are in no way standardized nation-wide (USA, at least). But your point still stands that it seems easier to hack a computerized voting system to commit large-scale fraud than to fraud with paper ballots.

bl0bon The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (1987)

'auto' is only available to use when the type of a variable can be automatically deduced from its initializer, meaning the declaration would be redundant. It has nothing to do with type conversions.

edit: now I see what you mean in the context of adding assertions to make type conversions safer, and how there could be some parallels with auto for that