bronz

Yes, this is only about physics for me too. My physics does check out though. If you are in a car and it accelerates from 0 to 30 mph you will experience the symptoms of acceleration. For example, an object that is hanging from a string in your frame of reference, such as a fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror, will appear to move backwards on its own. Try holding the fuzzy dice while running on a treadmill. I guarantee you won't see anything like that happen. Because you are not accelerating.

You're absolutely right about flight sims. They are definitely the least sickening non-stationary experiences. The reason that not being able to move around is such a big deal in my eyes is because that is what I always fantasized about. I think that first person experiences are what most VR fans fantasized about. But you and many other people in this thread have made the very good point that VR can create new genres. Genres that are well suited for VR.

Thanks for editing out your suggestion for me to "read a high-school physics textbook." The earth is the frame of reference when considering free body diagrams of objects moving around on its surface for all practical purposes. Neither the treadmill nor the person using the treadmill moves with respect to the earth and therefore no bodily acceleration is experienced by the user. In the virtual world, however, the user does move and bodily acceleration is expected. Therefore, a treadmill cannot alleviate the problems caused by acceleration mismatching.

I genuinely apologize. I love the HN comments and I wouldn't want to muddy them with stuff that people find distracting. In my defense, I was simply referring to the fact that whenever I voice this opinion anywhere on the internet it is not taken well because of the amount of enthusiasm in the VR community. I was not begging for upvotes. I will try to do this less often.

Well, in accordance with tradition I will now lay my thoughts down and be down-voted into oblivion for it. VR will flounder. I was a VR evangelist from 2012 to around 2014. I owned a DK2 -- I followed every shred of VR news like a fanatic. And what I learned from being so involved with VR was that it is not ready for mass adoption and probably never will be. People in the VR community drastically underplay nausea and discomfort. The main flaw is that if you move in the virtual world but not in the real world, your body does not like it. Thanks to head tracking, you can move the camera wherever you can move your head without sickness because the movement in the real world and virtual world are the same. But if you want to move around in any greater capacity than that without making 50% of people sick immediately, and perhaps 80% sick after just a few hours, then you have to do full body tracking. We are talking about 3/4 of games, easily. Games where you are a character and you run around in virtual space.

Even if you do full body tracking in your home, you are going to be extremely limited. You'll be running into the boundaries of your play space constantly. Those tricks of perception that allow you to walk along a curve instead of a straight line and thus never hit a boundary require very large amounts of space, especially if it is done in a way that is not detectable at all by the user. "What about omni-directional treadmills?" At this point I think we are getting crazy. Not only are you buying a hugely expensive VR headset, but you are setting aside a huge space in your home and buying a fucking gigantic omni-directional treadmill. Plus, the treadmill also does not provide the bodily acceleration required to prevent sickness because you are stationary relative to the earth while you use it.

And all of this is assuming that VR headsets reach a place where we have full FOV, perfect resolution and extremely high refresh rates. And VR headsets that have all of that will never be affordable unless they become popular. And they probably won't because of the reasons that I have just explained to you.

The one thing that I think has the potential to make VR popular is monitor replacement. Other than that, when I look at the future of this kind of technology I see AR. Not VR. I am sorry Rift fans, it was painful for me too.

Can someone explain why chaining code together on the block chain is useful? I have heard this idea before but never seen an explanation of its utility.

For people who want to learn more about machine learning, check out this free textbook written by Yoshua Bengio.

http://www.deeplearningbook.org/

Once again, I am so glad that I caught this on the live-stream because it will be in the history books. The implications of these games are absolutely tremendous. Consider GO: it is a game of sophisticated intuition. We have arguably created something that beats the human brain in its own arena, although the brain and AlphaGO do not use the same underlying mechanisms. And this is the supervised model. Once unsupervised learning begins to blossom we will witness something that is as significant as the emergence of life itself.

Wow, this really sucks. I had the exact same concept in mind for my next game. Like, during the trailer when he shows the crashed ship, my jaw dropped. Almost every aspect of the game is the same as what I had in mind. I had the exact same idea and I was really excited about it. Oh well.

Who was the GO professional commentator? He was consistently predicting the moves of both Sedol and alphago. I was extremely impressed.

I am so glad that I got to see this live. These matches will be historic.

I do have a sense of why some people use drugs because I have lived inside of a heroin epidemic. There's no reason to have such a condescending tone. Anyway, they should be punished to prevent them from using dangerous drugs.

You shouldn't mix me up with prohibitionists and Christians. I only want to prevent unnecessary suffering. Heroin and other very hard drugs only cause suffering and death. I have seen this first hand. That's how I know. People seem to hate me personally for having these opinions and I can't imagine why because I only have the welfare of other people in mind.

edit: I have looked through some of your comments. At one point you posed the question: what is the difference between letting someone eat cheeseburgers and use drugs? You practically make my point for me. Regulating the contents of food is extremely effective in reducing health problems. It has been done with success in many places. Saying that hard drugs (not weed and the like) should just be legal is like saying we should let food companies put anything they want into their foods and by extension let people eat whatever they want. Obviously, everything is much better when we regulate our foods.

Gambling is illegal in many, many places and in the places where gambling is legal many people get sucked in and lose tons of money, sometimes pushing themselves into poverty and ruin. These are all pretty well known things. I don't know what else to say.

I think that there are two kinds of drug users, basically. People use drugs because of hardship and people who use drugs because of boredom. When it comes to the hardship camp, I think the best solution is to alleviate the hardship. This means making sure that everyone has a well paying, respectable job and making sure public infrastructure is healthy and so on. When it comes to boredom users though, it's hard to come up with a solution besides punishment. Look at the current heroin epidemic. Yes, it is illegal to use drugs, but affluent white kids don't have to worry about police, so they just don't care. I grew up in an affluent, white neighborhood so I have seen this first hand. In these places, there might as well be no laws regarding drugs. And I think the results are not very surprising. Dumb teenage kids try heroin and then get hooked and then suffer some horrible consequence which can oftentimes be death. I personally knew two people who died that way.

Your argument is like saying that we should make insider trading legal because people still do insider trading. Or that we should abandon financial laws and regulations because the great recession happened in spite of them. This is incorrect. Regulations prevent financial collapses. If harsh punishment were distributed to everyone who engaged in corporate crime then corporate crime would plummet. And I truly believe that if affluent white kids had a real, tangible threat to their short term well-being in response to drug use then we would see a massive decline in their drug use. I know that HN hates this opinion but I'm just being honest. Go ahead and hate me. Downvote away.

Some drugs must be outlawed. Asking why heroin or cocaine need to be illegal is like asking why gambling has to be illegal. If you allow people to use addictive drugs or gamble freely then they will destroy themselves. Or huge numbers of people will, anyway.

I have never owned a smartphone. For the last six years I have not owned any kind of cell-phone, period. For the past four years I have used an Ipod touch so that I can make VOIP calls and check the web if there is wifi around. Despite what you might think, not having a phone is pretty liberating. If I get lost then it is up to me to find my way. This has lead to some super scary situations driving to and from the Oakland airport. Every time people ask me if they can give me a call on my cell phone I have to explain to them that I don't have a cell phone and that I use an Ipod instead, which can be awkward. I have had a few situations where people came up to me and desperately begged me for the use of my phone because they lost theirs or were presumably experiencing some kind of emergency. Now I know from experience that people will not believe you if you tell them that you don't have a phone in that context. If you go without a phone you will quickly learn that people have completely abandoned the concept of meeting at a place at a certain time and planning it a day or two in advance. Also people look super stupid when they are glued to their phones, especially in the car. I do scoff at those people and it feels good. Anyway, I will probably be getting a dumb-phone soon. You need one for two-step authentication and many other services nowadays. And also it is much easier to just provide a number when people ask for your cell number rather than explaining stuff to them.

I'm transferring to a UC in computer science soon. This is the last year in which computer science will not be considered an "impacted major" at my school. A sign of the times. Recently everyone's been talking about making CS mandatory in high school. And looking around on the web I see that some of the resources for learning computer science are very nice indeed. Is it petty to be worried that there will soon be so many computer science people in the world that I wont be able to make a living in computer science? I feel like a hypocrite for being an advocate for single payer healthcare, which is a step forward but might destroy a lot of jobs in the insurance business, and simultaneously hoping that computer science remains somewhat exclusive.

Make sure to check out his upcoming game, Openbar. It looks really, really good.

Thank you.

Wow. Thank you for this very comprehensive answer.

You seem to know a lot about Iranian politics, would you recommend something to read to bring an American up to speed on Iranian culture and politics both domestic and international?

So what did he mean when he said that Iran would be able to access its holdings abroad?

"A senior American official said Saturday that Iran will be able to access about $50 billion of a reported $100 billion in holdings abroad, although others have used higher estimates."

Please do this.

This is unbelievable. How can they possibly justify the cost of this system?

Check out Feudal Wars. It's really cool.

http://www.feudalwars.net

I think this is an interesting problem. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr et al dominate the internet. They are mostly used for garbage. There are more people on the web now than ever and they use these platforms like they use a permanent marker and a bathroom stall. At the same time, as has been mentioned elsewhere in these comments, it hasn't gotten much easier to run a blog. There are hosting costs to consider and the technical barrier is still there, although it is lower than it used to be. Also, perhaps most importantly, it is not immediately clear whether one can or cannot gain traction with a blog. People don't seem to read them as much as they used to and they don't have a fancy interface to subscribe and follow (at least not one that most people are familiar with today). Maybe someone could make a platform for people who want to make a blog but are dealing with these issues. Some kind of intellectual Tumlr? A place where making a blog is simple and you are sure to make traction because of the large readership of the platform. A place like Hacker News but with blog posts perhaps.

I vote yes.

That URL rings a bell. I think you're right.

This rumor broke a while ago so I don't remember the exact details. But essentially what I found when the rumor did break was that Apple had hired lots of engineers who specialized in the automotive industry. I looked at some of the LinkedIn pages and these engineers specialized in things that had basically nothing to do with Carplay. It was claimed that Apple hired tons of these engineers, too many for Carplay to justify, but I never looked at every single LinkedIn page to confirm. Also, most famously, several vehicles were spotted around the bay area that had license plates connected to Apple. These vehicles were outfitted with arrays of cameras an possibly LIDAR. I assumed that there was no LIDAR to be safe. In my judgement the quantity and positioning of the cameras indicated very strongly that they were a part of an autonomous vehicle system, not a street view program or anything else I could think of at the time. Then there were the anonymous sources. They claimed that Apple was working on an EV and that its development was referred to as Project Titan internally. I guess that should be taken with a grain of salt. The most convincing thing for me is the broader picture. Apple has a lot of experience and expertise in power electronics. It has manufacturing prowess even if it is through 3rd parties. And it has a huge amount of cash that is sitting around waiting to be spent on creating the next big thing. And most importantly Apple recognizes the fact that there is an EV revolution approaching. The motive, means and opportunity all line up for the Apple EV. All of this makes me give some weight to the rumors but no, nothing has really been proven with hard evidence yet.

I remember there was another machine learning textbook being drafted on the web. I can't remember the name, author or url though. Anyone know what I'm talking about? Any other resources would be appreciated, too.