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Couldn't you just as easily use a balloon on a tether?

Google Maps does do this in "Earth" mode (formerly "Satellite").

Mercator is the default projection for most schools in the USA.

The "style" image (tar23.png) is a symlink to the input image[0], so I guess it's intentional. I'm still not sure why that ended up swapping the colors in the output, though.

[0] https://github.com/luanfujun/deep-photo-styletransfer/tree/m...

jackcarteron The Future of Not Working

The multiplication by 365 to get the annual number.

jackcarteron Spin wants to bring dock-less bike sharing to the US

Dynamic pricing to incentivize trips that bring bikes back to high-demand origin points?

jackcarteron Intuition in Mathematics (2012) [pdf]

Using "to be" isn't necessarily the passive voice. The author doesn't use the passive voice in those sentences.

http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/passive-voice/

jackcarteron HSBC Currency Traders Got Greedy on Christmas

And my all-time favorite, for the title:

"Law Firm Accountants Were Bad at Accounting, Law" https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-03-06/law-firm-...

jackcarteron The Strange Politics of Peter Thiel, Trump’s Most Unlikely Supporter

Fischer did not play the King's Gambit.

http://www.academicchess.org/images/pdf/chessgames/fischerbu...

jackcarteron Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

I hope they release a private enterprise version, like they have for StackOverflow[0]. I'd love to host this on-prem to document my company's codebase.

Anyone know of a similar solution that's available now?

[0] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16054/is-the-stack-e...

jackcarteron Judges Rely on a Flawed $2 Drug Test That Puts Innocent People Behind Bars

http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm

'"Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer," says English jurist William Blackstone. The ratio 10:1 has become known as the "Blackstone ratio.'

jackcarteron The TSA Is Bad Because We Demand That It Be Bad

In checked bags, they're only looking for bombs. In carry-on bags, which you have access to during the flight, they also screen for weapons.

jackcarteron The Most and Least Expensive Cars to Maintain

Here's a video on soda can design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw

jackcarteron Ask HN: How do you use Amazon Echo?

I use it for exactly 3 things:

* Weather (do I need a jacket or umbrella?)

* Music (I never used Prime Music before)

* Checking how long until my train arrives. This is by far the most useful application for me; I use it every morning. I bought the Echo so that I could develop a Chicago train app (CTA Tracker), but there seems to be one for every major city now.

jackcarteron The Absurd Primacy of the Car in American Life

Chicago tried: https://www.wbez.org/shows/dynamic-range/the-short-sad-life-...

jackcarteron Developing for the Amazon Echo

I built a similar app for Chicago's CTA trains, called CTA Tracker. There seem to be train tracker apps for most major cities, since they're easy to implement and legitimately useful.

jackcarteron Software “detects CEO emotions, predicts financial performance”

Regression to the mean historical growth of X%, then.

jackcarteron Olbers’ Paradox: Why Is the Sky Dark at Night? (2000)

Yes, but as you look deeper into the night sky, you see more and more stars (proportional to the square of the distance). These two factors cancel exactly.

jackcarteron A Startup That Gives You Free WiFi Whenever You Throw Garbage in a Bin

Dolphins found a way to con a similar system:

"When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on."

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.scie...

jackcarteron 3D printing titanium: Learning to learn from success

Here's a video about 3D-printing a dress, which uses the "wadding-up" solution you mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdRswasftfI

jackcarteron Unisex Names – Data Analysis Use Case

>Let’s say we define 20%-80% as our threshold, so if a name is used on, let’s say girls, more than 80%, we call the name female-dominant. If it is used on less than 20%, then we call that name “male-dominant” name. Otherwise, we are left with the range from 20% to 80% (60% of all names) which I propose to consider “unisex” names.

Interesting writeup, but this is obviously faulty reasoning.

jackcarteron How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

Soylent is to soy as javascript is to java.

jackcarteron Why do buses bunch?

Why are buses planned to arrive in bunches? Double-length buses save a driver, but if you have two single-length buses, what's the advantage to bunching?

jackcarteron Show HN: Sssaving – Are you gaining or losing money each month?

I'm impressed that it does 2-factor authentication. Mint has been dragging its feet on that for years.

Too bad there's no Vanguard integration. Can you add an input for monthly autodeposits?

jackcarteron Free (as in beer) Dynos

Seems like they're walking back from the previous announcement, which said they'd give 12 hours of non-sleep time per day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9295874

There's a huge difference between 24 hours/day and 18 hours/day, but I don't think there's such a big difference going from 18->12, so I don't think many people will care about this improvement.

jackcarteron The state of Computer Vision and AI: we are really, really far (2012)

"From the objective" is neither stated nor implied either.

jackcarteron How Heartbleed could've been found

You're thinking of Apple's "goto fail" bug, not Heartbleed.

jackcarteron Show HN: Ballistic – A Personal Finance Tracker

I'm getting "Error: XSRF Token mismatch.." when trying to add an investment.

jackcarteron How iron feels the heat

It probably hasn't led to any predictions yet. This seems to be a theoretical model for empirical phenomena.

I took a course in material science once, and it's ridiculous how many variables are involved in developing new alloys. Not only does the precise ratio of several ingredients matter, you can get wildly different results by heating the metal to slightly different temperatures. Even the rate at which you cool the metal after heating matters. If we have a better understanding of the underlying processes, maybe we can better decide what experiments are worth trying.

jackcarteron Why We Should Build Cloud Cities on Venus

To be precise, it's 8x the lifting capacity (=2^3), which would be 5.6 million tons, or "nearly 6 million".