Hacker News Reader

deltaqueueon Digging the grave of my skills: Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs

There are. FX artists are already coming to grips with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRESQ8NX-us

"yadda yadda, this is the worst it will ever be"

deltaqueueon Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

That "TPU advantage" might be slowing Google down (though likely not as much as their internal bureaucracy).

Porting CUDA-based research, debugging, and overall experimentation speed is likely slower.

The GPU is still king for training.

deltaqueueon Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service

Dozens of responses, and not one mention of Dropbox. Works perfectly for this exact purpose on Android.

deltaqueueon Mapcode – A short address for any location on Earth

Having traveled to several countries without formal addresses, this looks like a godsend for navigation. It has no regional segmentation (i.e. no drill-down reference like country-state-zip-city levels), however, so it's useless as a cultural reference.

Slightly off topic, but I'm stupefied at how much faster TomTom's maps (and Bing, apparently!) are than GoogleMaps.

deltaqueueon Vermeer's paintings might be 350 year-old color photographs

The technology Jenison relies on can replicate art, but it does so synthetically, with no understanding of art's inner life

What a bunch of rhetorical diarrhea. This was nothing more than an exercise in curiosity, an exploration and evaluation of a hypothesis. This was not an attempt to disprove Vermeer's creativity, disprove artists in general, or disprove art.

deltaqueueon Sistine Chapel

I haven't done the math, but seeing the chapels in Cappadocia, Turkey seems to prove this. Most of the chapels contain frescoes that are significantly color-faded, but Karanlık Kilise ("Dark Church"), which is quite dim and has very little ambient light, contains frescoes with far richer color. [1]

Unfortunately, the guards stationed there like to yell at tourists even if their flashes are off, so I suspect most people don't understand the reasoning.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churches_of_G%C3%B6reme

deltaqueueon The Pleasure of Designing your own Furniture

For what it's worth Buildasofa.com in the US seems to be making custom more affordable. I can't speak to the quality as I haven't ordered anything, but several friends speak highly of them and I believe their prices are far below the $5k number being thrown around.

deltaqueueon Lytro Announces New Light Field Camera

Almost all DSLRs and I assume many point-and shoots have an automatic focus tracking mode for moving subjects. Canon's is called AI servo. That said, most people don't move beyond the "auto" setting on their high-end cameras, so I can understand the quest to simplify.

Autofocus in smartphones will hopefully get better over time, but if your options are an overall superior DSLR or an equally large camera that just gives you some flexible (albeit one-dimensional) focusing benefits then I think the choice is clear. Practice a little more with your DSLR and wait to see if Lytro can be implanted into a better supporting cast of parts at a reasonable cost.

deltaqueueon Lytro Announces New Light Field Camera

As much as I dislike the stereotypical criticism on HN I agree completely. I still don't know what problem Lytro is trying to solve or what benefit it provides, and I've yet to hear about a successful application in the consumer space. Refocusing after a picture has been taken is interesting, but useless unless your camera/phone/whatever doesn't focus properly.

Depth of field is just one of many tools used to convey a photograph. For $1500 this camera better blow away other prosumer point-and-shoots like the RX100 Mk II, RX10, Ricoh GR, etc. Given the cost of light-field technology I suspect compromises in sensor sensitivity, dynamic range, and ISO will have to be made.

deltaqueueon For $45 Per Month, All the Coffee You Can Drink

Getting a bit pedantic, but a few corrections:

1. That origin is just urban legend. Americanos started in the 70's.

2. Per ounce, you're technically correct about the strength of espresso vs. drip/brewed coffee. But brews have variable strengths, and most Americans drink 12, 18, and 24 ounce drip coffees (which ends up being more caffeine than even a quad shot of espresso).

deltaqueueon The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies

Your inference was incorrect. I said my job was to keep our sales reps from making false promises, which includes (but is not limited to) bending the truth, lying by omission, making incorrect assertions, etc.

My industry is highly mobile and quite competitive so we don't gain anything by stretching truths. Customers can leave as quickly as they come, and since we're a small shop we use a consultative sales approach to ensure customers will be happy long-term.

Again, the solution is more complex than "just tell the truth." Tell the truth in a positive way, offer viable alternatives, and re-emphasize what matters. We're selling to humans, not Vulcans.

deltaqueueon The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies

I deal with this everyday selling software, and it's much more complex than being truthful and lying.

My job as a technical consultant to our sales staff is to bridge the gap between needs assessment and salesmanship. I have a 0 tolerance policy about lying during sales (I have to be to keep our sales guys from making false promises), but I struggle with finding that delicate balance between the truth, focusing on what's important to a prospect, and the manner in which you talk about capabilities you don't have. You cannot simply tell a prospect you don't have a feature if they don't actually need it because there's a lot of psychology at play. A competitor told them they needed that feature so you now have to mitigate their concerns. You essentially need to find a way to be truthful while simultaneously transferring emphasis to your selling points or to their needs.

deltaqueueon My Experience using a Bitcoin ATM

I had a similarly poor experience[1]. Many people are retorting that you have to go through this process with all financial institutions. To those, I say you're missing the point. We still have to answer a lot of questions regarding regulation around cryptocurrencies, but part of the allure is that you shouldn't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to use bitcoin. Furthermore, the first (and only) time I dropped by the bitcoin markup was astronomical.

It's naive to think we'll resolve this overnight, but until then there's no point to using a robocoin ATM.

[1] http://www.jauntworthy.com/blog/2014/2/21/first-impression-o...

deltaqueueon Amazon to Raise Fees as Revenue Disappoints

The flipside of this is that Walmart does not charge extra for small, individual items, and I suspect they're losing a lot of money by doing so. I'm a heavy Amazon user, but as an experiment (and because I needed some individual toiletries) I ordered ~15 items from Walmart.com. Walmart's answer to this shipment request was to send 5 separate packages from different places and taking anywhere from 1 day to 10 days. Shipping transit estimations were all off. One shipment was just a single loofah. Just a very annoying process altogether.

Even with these add-on products Amazon is basically forcing you to adopt a Costco / buy-in-bulk model, and I think it's the only profitable and sensible direction.

deltaqueueon What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

From the article and throughout the comments here it seems Backblaze prefers cheaper drives over a few percentage points of reliability. It would be interesting to see some data showing the tradeoff, but I suspect it reveals too much of their operation. At first glance it appears you can get a drive with .9% failure rate (HGST 7K3000) for $127[1], and yet BB really likes the WD Red, which has a higher failure rate (3.2%) and cost[2].

What might shed light without revealing too much is information about where they source drives today (their sourcing coverage during the shortage was very cool!). I suspect they're finding some nice bulk discounts somewhere.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Hitachi-Deskstar-7K3000-HDS723030ALA64... [2] http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B008JJLW4M/ (both seem to be market consumer prices)

deltaqueueon $695 USB cable wins TAS's editors' choice award

I love that this is still alive and well in 2014.

Psychoacoustics are still very much apart of the audiophile world; although, the internet has helped reduce the hype to some degree. People believe whatever they perceive and aren't inherently objective.

A/B tests do crop up from time to time in various audio / video communities (AVS and some car audio forums hold some pretty objective events) but science doesn't always provide an answer people want to accept.

deltaqueueon Bitcoin nodes surged to 200k

Coinbase handled the recent surge in traffic pretty poorly. When prices tanked / fluctuated heavily, they turned off the ability to buy citing "a lack of bitcoin" and told users they could put in buy orders now for the market price on Friday or Monday. Two days later when the price is back up to ~$700 you can mysteriously buy again.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but USD liquidity has been extraordinarily frustrating over the past several days since most exchanges are foreign (and US bank wires take days to weeks).

deltaqueueon Pencil

Can any artists on HN comment on how useful styli are with tips this thick? I suspect the added thickness is required for capacitive touch screens, but I always thought my fingertip was far too thick for accurately initiating thin lines or dots (e.g. in games like Draw Something). Something like this seems like it would require far less erasing:

http://www.wacom.com/en/us/everyday/bamboo-stylus-feel-samsu...

*edited for clarity

deltaqueueon Interactive Resume

Agree completely, and well done to the OP.

So far I've seen "you can't print this out!" (who cares?) and "some of the transitions could be smoother!"

This one is my favorite:

"This isn't a one-page form. It's not going to fit on my desk. I'm going to pass on this candidate."

Seriously people? You think this guy doesn't have a hard copy of his resume? Your goal is to hire a talented candidate. This exercise demonstrates talent, and was created for exposure. Not optimization of communication in the form of a one-page CV that will end up decomposing on some hiring manager's desk that doesn't have the decency to reply to candidates he or she will not be hiring.

deltaqueueon This Bird Can Stay in Flight for Six Months Straight

My first thought would be to scoff at your criticism. Would the birds' travel patterns be any less impressive if they were resting for very short periods during these 200 days? The sensor measures acceleration, so the only potential confusion might be with light movement near ground / trees.

But according to another study, some migratory birds rest for only seconds at a time during their flights:

http://www.livescience.com/1045-migrating-birds-hundreds-dai...

At 4-minute intervals over 200 days, you have 72,000 datapoints. There are 1,920,000 9-second intervals (avg nap period from other article) over 200 days, so given their data collection spans only 3.75% of this time there's a chance they missed one of these naps.

Nevertheless, this is still very interesting.

deltaqueueon How much can an extra hour's sleep change you?

I have almost hit several emergency vehicles during the day due to my car's sound dampening and my car stereo (which doesn't have to be loud to block out sirens). At night, this has never happened because I have never not seen the seizure-inducing lights. My sample size may be less than a hundred, but you're making an assumption that piercing sirens at night are the most effective way to alert the public of an emergency. And for those blind pedestrians, low-frequency (or even lower decibel) sirens are more than sufficient.

I live on the 9th floor of a condo building that unfortunately has single-pane windows. If I don't have an extremely loud fan blowing, I will be woken up by everything from emergency vehicles to motorcyclists. I realize this comes with the territory of living in a city, but if cosmopolitan cities like Geneva can incorporate effective noise pollution laws* then there's room to improve.

* http://www.cagi.ch/en/logement/bruit-de-voisinage.php

deltaqueueon Tesla outsells Porsche, Jaguar, others in California

This was my initial thought given the dealership limitations in North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Minnesota, and New York, but do you know for sure how out-of-state sales work?

I'm asking because the report seems to use registrations and not just sales figures to describe the numbers in California[1]. To my knowledge a registration only occurs in the state where you're going to use the vehicle, but I don't know if the process varies for these trouble states.

[1] http://www.cncda.org/secure/GetFile.aspx?ID=2583

deltaqueueon You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

Yes, but this shouldn't come as a shocker to anyone that uses Facebook and Android. You can arrange to have contacts synced in Android so that you can see updates / photos / phone numbers merged with your Google contacts. NSA access notwithstanding, Facebook is in the business of making it easier to interact and socialize with people.

Alternatively, you can use the app "Tinfoil" for Facebook, which is essentially a locked-down web browser that provides a watered down Facebook experience.

deltaqueueon Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

If you want to maintain a high reputation for your MTA's deliverability, ignore this post. Attempting to send hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of malformed addresses to domains (some of which will be well-formed) will result in a higher spam score that will ultimately create more work for whoever is managing your mail platform.

deltaqueueon Heat map of homophobic and racist tweets

Nearly all questions answered in the "about map" link:

=========================================

The data behind this map is based on every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 - April 2013 containing one of the 'hate words'. This equated to over 150,000 tweets and was drawn from the DOLLY project based at the University of Kentucky. Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing 'hate words' as "negative," this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

To produce the map all tweets containing each 'hate word' were aggregated to the county level and normalized by the total twitter traffic in each county. Counties were reduced to their centroids and assigned a weight derived from this normalization process. This was used to generate a heat map that demonstrates the variability in the frequency of hateful tweets relative to all tweets over space. Where there is a larger proportion of negative tweets referencing a particular 'hate word' the region appears red on the map, where the proportion is moderate, the word was used less (although still more than the national average) and appears a pale blue on the map. Areas without shading indicate places that have a lower proportion of negative tweets relative to the national average.

The numbers that appear in the map during a mouse hover indicate the total number of hateful tweets and number of unique users sending them in each county.

==========================================

EDIT: The mouse overs don't appear to work very well in Chrome or Firefox, but from the one or two times I was able to see some numbers it appears that each red circle may be a dozen or less tweets. Also, the hot zones dissipate significantly the further you zoom in, so without any statistics or numbers it's difficult to draw conclusions.

A very interesting experiment, but given that the data is only normalized by Twitter traffic (non-response bias) this is in no way indicative of the actual distribution of racism.

deltaqueueon You don’t have to feel guilty for oversleeping

It seems as though this comments section is filled with self-proclaimed "night owls." I'm curious, have any of you read the linked articles about variables that influence people to remain awake later than they should and have these types of erratic sleep patterns / modified circadian rhythms (heavy computer use / blue light exposure)? And, have any of you tested your own reaction to curtailing these late-night activities while introducing natural sunlight stimulant in the morning?

I'm not asking in a derogatory way; I'm genuinely curious since I experimented with this myself and found positive results. My guess is that most haven't, and that it's easier just to accept a "night owl" classification in lieu of hundreds of thousands of years of human dependence on the sun and fire for light. Based on my limited research it seems that those without significant mental illness sleep well with habit and controlled stimuli (including natural light). Has anyone, through any amount of reasonable testing, found this NOT to be true?

deltaqueueon Oslo is turning garbage into energy and is running out of garbage

I'm still not convinced this is a viable solution for waste management (not that there's a simple alternative), given the environmental implications. Yes, air pollution is pretty regulated and has been reduced significantly since the 80's[1], but the residues resulting from the filtering process are still heavily toxic and it's not clean by any means[2].

[1] http://www.seas.columbia.edu/earth/wtert/sofos/Waste_Inciner...

[2] Section 10: http://www.ecomed.org.uk/content/IncineratorReport_v3.pdf

deltaqueueon Razer will not cancel 90%-off test coupons

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Groupon customers do not return for additional purchases and the people who capitalize on these types of deals are 100% price-conscious vultures[1] (also, I used to be one of these people). At the end of the day, this was a very poor business decision and just a PR gamble.

People are primarily driven by price when they buy goods, so after 6 months or so people will forget this extremely generous act. Razer fans will remain razer fans, but unless Razer has a product leaps and bounds ahead of the competition (some are, but most are only marginally superior) very few will become loyal customers due to this act of kindness.

[1] http://businessmodelinstitute.com/is-customer-retention-the-...

deltaqueueon Explosions near Boston Marathon finish line

Slightly off topic, but is anyone else confused by the fact that several runners in this video[1] reacted to the explosion but did not turn and proceeded to keep running? These people weren't exactly leading the pack (at a 4+ hours finish time), so my guess is that they are just severely deprived of nutrients and aren't processing what's happening, but it's still a bit baffling to me why some didn't turn to see what was going on.

[1] https://vine.co/v/bFdt5uwg6JZ

*EDIT - thanks to those who confirmed. My confusion is now totally irrelevant after seeing the finish-line view of the same people[2]. It just took them a few seconds to register and they were just in a running flow.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=046MuD1pYJg

deltaqueueon Google Fiber’s Next Stop: Austin, Texas

I spoke with someone in Grande's (competing ISP) network planning division and he explained that getting into new buildings downtown was very expensive / difficult given Austin's telco requirements (have to dig up streets, etc.). Is this also the case for Google's fiber layout, or is there any speculation that buildings (condo and apartment) downtown will see this service?