Hacker News Reader

boyakaon USB 3.0 Promoter Group Announces USB Type-C Connector Ready for Production [pdf]

http://cdn.thedroidguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/USB-pl...

Source article actually relevant to topic: http://thedroidguy.com/2014/04/next-generation-usb-type-c-ca...

boyakaon First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

Well, I admit that I was pretty ignorant about the work being done on this project in regards to time-lapsed video. I guess I could add to my previous statement that they also cut out irrelevant frames (parts of the video that aren't in the camera path). I don't think this would be THAT difficult to do manually, but I admit that the technical video showing how they were able to graph/visualize the irrelevant frames is pretty cool, and the interesting resulting effects people are discussing in this thread (disappearing/appearing objects, the video game loading effects) are amusing.

I never said that it was trivial, just that similar stuff has already been done and made a "standard stabilization technology", automatically and easily just by uploading to youtube. It seems that youtube's techniques aren't necessarily completely different: there's a screenshot of an article from Google in this video [1] called "Auto-directed Video Stabilization With Robust L1 Optimal Camera Paths". However, I do appreciate and shouldn't disrespect the specialized work being done for time-lapsed videos. My apologies.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgAdeuxkUyY

boyakaon First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

Video stabilization + more FPS / slower rate than the "every 10 frames timelapse" + feel good inspirational music = this

I would guess that I could upload a shaky video to youtube to get it smoothed out, download it, and speed it up with similar to their rate and get similar results. The timelapse that they show that is so much worse uses way less frames of the raw footage (every 10th frame?) and goes way faster than their "hyperlapse". It isn't a fair comparison.

boyakaon Bizarro World: World Record Tetris (2007)

http://www.hulu.com/watch/429491

boyakaon Researcher’s death shocks Japan

Putting words into the mouth of the dead? Oh, the letter says it's from 7/2 and even the url shows that! It must be!

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.riken.jp/~/media/ri...

As of now it says it was crawled 8/6 at 00:57 (current time is 8/5 18:00 pst) so I suppose it was crawled when I typed it in to the search? But that wouldn't match up with any time zone (maybe 1:57 London time).

I also suppose that it is legitimate and they just had it lying around and decided to post it up today.

Originally found linked in this article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26001-stem-cell-scient...

boyakaon Researcher’s death shocks Japan

Sauce of letter content? I found one news article [1] that says "Police and Riken said Sasai left what appeared to be suicide notes, but refused to disclose their contents."

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2716540/Japanese-sci...

boyakaon Researcher’s death shocks Japan

I don't like how whenever there is a suicide, the possibility of being suicided (somebody else making it look like a suicide with the intent to discredit and kill) is never suggested, considered, and is even looked at as conspiratorial paranoia. Of course in this case there are 3 letters left on the scene, which (if convincingly written by him) would be good evidence pointing toward legitimate suicide. I would like to see video/witness evidence, more investigation into events leading up to the death, etc.

The only reason I suggest it as a possibility is the fact that he was highly passionate about important, controversial research. I would think that he wouldn't want to commit suicide because of this and that other people would be out to get him. His work is now being dismantled and he is dead, which is a big win for people that did not like what he was doing, and clearly a tragic loss for everything that he believed in.

boyakaon Why it makes sense to bike without a helmet

The fact that they require money, maintenance, and effort to use? It may be minimal but it is there.

boyakaon DiscoverTracks – Musicians you love listen to what you like

Why not just go to soundcloud.com/artist/likes and click play? That already makes a playlist of their likes...

boyakaon Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

Sorry I didn't mention it, I followed the wiki install which sets up the production environment. Just noticed after seeing your post that there are pretty simple instructions for the development setup, if I just kept looking past the wiki link.

I ran it in development mode first with the only hitch being I needed to re-run the mysql user/table creation with _dev, but once I did that the development started up flawlessly on localhost:3000. I then went back to the apache/production server and suddenly it looks a lot better, but I still have some missing images (FATALs in log for GETing assets still?).

I'm still confused about how to point my rails server to production instead of development, but I'm completely satisfied that it is working perfectly with rails in development mode. Here's a screenshot showing the images missing on my production/apache/passenger setup:

http://i.imgur.com/XVLz7lt.png

boyakaon Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years

I'm a complete Rails noob, can anybody help me understand why after installing this my app shows up without any formatting? http://imgur.com/pQ8wOdG

I did notice that there was a Warning regarding different versions of libxml used for Nekogiri:

$ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate WARNING: Nokogiri was built against LibXML version 2.8.0, but has dynamically loaded 2.7.8

boyakaon Washington, Minnesota officially endorse a “safer, faster” traffic merge

His reasoning is safety, because it's supposedly (and I guess understandably...) unsafe for cars to be moving at very different speeds next to each other. I assume what people are afraid of (or what actually happens) is that people in the lane moving slower might drift/shift into the lane moving faster and cause a collision. When this happens while both lanes are moving at similar speeds both cars are more capable of avoiding it.

I've been there. I've been in the backed up lane in traffic with the lane next to me moving much faster, near the speed limit. I often try to get into the fast moving lane and it is a bit scary because it can be difficult to see far back enough to get into the lane without cutting somebody off. I still believe it is the fault of the people in the slower lane for being there though, and it is their responsibility to stay in that lane or find a safe opening to get to the next lane. If I see a bunch of stubborn early mergers, I will assume that is where they want to be and I will drive past them like a bunch the bunch of parked cars they are. But I will indeed not necessarily drive 80+ mph and I will pay close attention to the movements of the cars.

boyakaon Washington, Minnesota officially endorse a “safer, faster” traffic merge

He is helping to correct traffic. Everybody else is messing up the zipper merging by not filling in both lanes equally.

boyakaon Google’s $1B purchase of Twitch confirmed

What's funny is that I have a Motorola Droid from 2009, the same time at which I could have gotten an iPhone 3GS, and the YouTube App is no longer supported on my Droid. I have my mom's old 3GS and the app runs perfectly.

boyakaon IBM announces $3B research initiative

pulses? I typed it into google and found this:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=597698...

boyakaon IBM announces $3B research initiative

The reason Moore's law worked so well is largely because of this. When we began creating transistors on integrated circuits, the only thing preventing us from making them exactly as small as they are today were things like cost and the capabilities of fabs to make them reliable and stable. So ever since we started making them we've stepped down the size by about half, rather than something smaller that would be more difficult and expensive to make. The entire manufacturing industry gradually became more efficient, increasing reliability and reducing the cost of fabricating the integrated circuits.

The history of performance speedup hasn't been solely due to doubling the transistors. Other types of architectural improvements in memory, buses, parallelism, multiple cores/threads have yielded performance doubling or more. Memory access has always been a huge latency and there are lots of ways to improve that without just making the transistors smaller.

We have a lot of work to do still! The majority of our computing has been on the x86 architecture, which basically stems from the 8080 which was designed in the mid 70s. We can still discover new and better architectures and materials. It's just the standard shrinkage of IC's that was the basis of Moore's Law originally has reached its limits.

boyakaon Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

I think rather than talking about GMOs we need to point out the crops that are seriously and obviously bad for us: the transgenically modified crops, or apparently I just found it can be called TGM. [0]

This saves us from the debate every time where somebody talks about how all our food and animals are GMO. The real destroyers of the American food supply are the 7 major crops that have been transgenically modified with bacteria that produces insecticide and herbicide resistant bacteria so they can spray the crops with herbs: Corn, soy, cottonseed, alfalfa, papaya, canola, sugar beets.

[0] http://books.google.com/books?id=IX5mo9ylOF0C&pg=PA38&lpg=PA...

Edit: Here's some good info about terminology I guess: http://iddl.vt.edu/courses/HORT4764/lessons/seeds/seeds_page...

boyakaon Psychedelic mushrooms put your brain in a “waking dream,” study finds

That's basically what Vice did:

http://www.vice.com/hamiltons-pharmacopeia/hamilton-and-the-...

boyakaon Building Better Bananas (2012)

Vitamin A, problem solved: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=106

boyakaon Comcast turns 50,000 paying customer homes into public hotspots

I'm not just making up a cause for worrying about free hotspots...It may have been conspiracy talk but there has been discussion about the ethics behind them before. I think it's worth discussing what people are doing with the power to control people's access to internet, especially when it seems like Comcast is just shoving them into peoples homes.

Fact: Once you have a XfinityWIFI added to your device and wifi turned on, you are automatically connecting to these hotspots.

Lots of customers don't understand the implication of this, which is that Comcast knows where you are located.

Fact: You can see a lot more information about devices connected to the an internet access point if you control the lowest routing layer. Just try hooking up a router into another router, and try seeing the devices connected to the first router on the second.

Giving Comcast control of routing the internet connection available on your property is allowing them to see details about devices in the area, which they would not see if they were simply providing you a single connection to a router that you own. Sure, plenty of providers had wifi built into their modems (all those crappy 2WIRE things), but at the very least the customer is able to set a password and control who Comcast is able to see is near their property. With this service it just seems like Comcast is making all it's customer's homes a tracking point for everybody else.

Why should customers be able to access the internet at random locations based on where other customers live? Isn't that what a mobile data connection is for? Sure, the more hotspots available the better, I guess, but if comcast wants to provide access to the internet it should create a technology that can do it without using other people's property/land/estate, and without being able to gather useful information about peoples' locations and maybe more detailed device and network traffic information.

Also, I don't know much about analyzing a single network interface for internet traffic from multiple users, like what we hear about the NSA doing at major internet hubs, but I assume a lot of work needs to be done to filter through information like that. I admit I don't have enough knowledge/experience/evidence/facts about networking, even though I did study computer engineering, but I will make an assumption (at least educated?) that if you have control over the lowest layer of routing you can get a lot more information about the activities taking place on the clients.

boyakaon Comcast turns 50,000 paying customer homes into public hotspots

I assume there is motivation for these large ISPs to provide internet access (and thus additional bandwidth) for free at all of their customer's locations. I assume there is some sort of profit being made from it, and I assume it has something to do with finding out what/who is near these access points and maybe seeing what they are doing and feeding them different sorts of data based on that information.

The property you own that they are utilizing is just that, your property, or your estate. They are using the land that you work your entire life to rent or own to scan mobile devices around it and gather information which they are profiting from.

I just think it is a stretch to go from a simple cable modem (which customers could easily own, but they'd rather give away their natural right to control their own property for ease of use/access) which should just simply be providing access to the bandwidth you are paying for (like cable boxes would just provide you a connection to your TV channels of choice), to operating an internet service to anybody in your area.

boyakaon Comcast turns 50,000 paying customer homes into public hotspots

I don't like this, because it creates a network that users can connect to, on YOUR property, that YOU don't control. Comcast is literally using the property you own to spy on people that are near you. I assume that they are doing a lot to control the traffic of individuals connecting to these hotspots.

boyakaon With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

That made me think of a chinese finger trap.

boyakaon Myths about ElementaryOS

"You’ve made a $20.88 USD payment to elementary. This charge will appear on your statement as “WPY*elementary”"

I paid!

boyakaon Fraudulent trading activity at Mt. Gox

Depends on what you consider a crash. IMO it crashed in November and hasn't had it's next climb yet.

boyakaon Fraudulent trading activity at Mt. Gox

Bitcoin has been pumped up and crashed 3 times. The fraudulent trading of Mt. Gox was only the most recent crash.

boyakaon Fraudulent trading activity at Mt. Gox

Because Mt. Gox is totally the foundation of bitcoin rollseyes

boyakaon Why Yahoo Keeps Killing Everything It Buys

I was actually expecting this question. I have spent several hours looking for it already, but it seems that mine was missed. I do have a Sysquest cartridge (tape drives like Zip disks) from that period that might have a lot of it, I just need to figure out how to interface with the SCSI reader.

If anybody happens to know something I don't about finding websites, the title of it was "Slasher's Realm" and I believe it was in TimesSquare somewhere, maybe under chasm or tower. Edit: ahh yeah, it seems like mine wasn't crawled before it got deleted http://www.reocities.com/timessquare/chasm/1788/

boyakaon Thomas Edison and the Cult of Sleep Deprivation

The whole deficit thing is interesting. I've felt that I do that too, but I've also heard people say that sleep doesn't work that way. It definitely could just be that any time I'm sleeping more than 8 hours I'm just being lazy.

boyakaon Thomas Edison and the Cult of Sleep Deprivation

Upvoted for being so sad. ;(