simonsquiff

This reminds me of how my visual psychology professor was attempting to help those with poor vision 15 years ago, but didn't appear to get anywhere with at the time.

The idea was a simple (but clever) one - use virtual reality to segment the world into solid blocks of identified objects. The solid blocks are identifiable to those with poor vision in a way that the real world is not.

Essentially this meant processing an image, identifying items e.g. cars, fences, roads etc and then colouring them solid. So instead of a confusing scene of blur, you have a blurred but still identifiable scene of a solid strip of grey for the road, a solid blob of red for the car, another solid yellow stip for a fence etc. A poorly sighted person could still identify from this something that made sense in a way that they couldn't in the real world.

What was required was an input, real time visual processing and then display back to the user - all of which was fantasy 15 year ago.

However, attempt this today with a visual feed, real time processing like this, and then near instantaneous display of the results back to the person with e.g. google glass, and you might have a viable way to show the world categorised in a visual way that will help those with poor vision. Interesting times.

Reminds me of this very interesting article saying that we're wasting our resources buying stuff that simply ends up in landfill http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/10/on-12th-...

One of Kurzweil's arguments in his response is "...the design of the brain (like the rest of the body) is contained in the genome. And while the translation of the genome into a brain is not straightforward, the brain cannot have more design information than the genome"

However the brain's design information is the genome, the laws of physics and a universe.

You only have to look at protein folding, and the complexity of the resulting molecule and how that interacts with the rest of the world, so see how much complexity is there outside of the genome - and it's that complex end result that you have to simulate or replicate.

He goes onto say that "..the amount of design information in the genome is about 50 million bytes, roughly half of which pertains to the brain. That’s not simple, but it is a level of complexity we can deal with and represents less complexity than many software systems in the modern world."

As above, this is greatly simplifying the end result that you're trying to replicate - the genome is just the software that's running on the OS/hardware of the universe. To replicate that virtually we'd also need a virtual universe.

Yes - this genuinely is excellent. I've already bought two albums (first I've got for years) and am really enjoying stepping through the results. Great stuff!

I hit the same problem, then fired up IE to try to get around it. Didn't work there either...unless you double click. I'd have given up if I'd not seen this comment!

The other thing that is rather confusing is that having selected the file, it's not clear how to proceed. I eventually clicked 'What have I missed' which seems to actually be 'I've not missed anything please click this button' - I think this could be better worded to just 'Go' or something similar once the file is selected.

He's amazing. I absolutely devoured his book 'Almost Everything There is to Know' as a kid, which was the collection of all his cartoons from decades at the Observer. It's now online http://www.timhunkin.com/40_rudiments_book.htm but I highly recommend getting a second hand copy of the book. I must have read it cover to cover about 5 times and I think it's the source of my reputation of always knowing ridiculous random facts.

Thank you for the link. I've just finished it and it was utterly enthralling. If you were interested in this article then please do listen to this - exceptionally well researched, beautifully put together and genuinely enlightening.

I'm not saying this is the only reason for the lack of warm up (especially today), but it was a significant part of the perceived reduction from old diesels. It's also why if you put petrol in the car by mistake, you can still ruin the engine even before you've turned the ignition (as opening the door starts the warm up and fuel pumps etc)

One similar anecdote I really like is what happened with diesel cars. You used to have to wait when starting the engine for it to ‘warm up’ and drivers obviously didn’t like that. Now you don’t have the wait. They actually hadn’t reduced the warm up time. What happens now is the warm up starts when you unlock the door, not when you try to start the engine! So by the time you go to start the engine it’s already done – to the driver there is no warmup time.

To be clear - I work for a software company that sells to enterprise (government) customers. So we can't fix their IE6 problem. We have one product that requires IE7 and have had some major push back with that in some places (for example, the entire Scottish NHS is IE6 and say they will remain so for a couple of years)

Government unfortunately - they are still very slow moving. And those that have moved have just moved to IE7..which doesn't help that much.

The real challenge is with enterprise applications that need a rich UI - this is where Flex was a good solution. Saying "just use HTML5" is fine when you serve the consumer space; it's not if you serve enterprises.

HTML5 is just not a go-er for enterprise products that need a rich UI. Even if it could do everything Flex can (and it can't, yet), you need a modern browser. Many enterprises still use IE6. I'd say 60% of our customers are on IE6; and the remaining 40% use IE7. Demanding IE9 would make an enterprise product dead in the water.

Flex fitted here. You have enterprises who say "no more client server, everything should be web" but then don't give you the web platform to be able to deliver the required user experience (i.e. you must use IE6/7). Flex let you deliver on the web, with a rich UI, on legacy browsers.

So you had a choice:

- Stay on client/server (lots of enterprises won't consider you)

- Develop for HTML5 (not quite prime time, no-one can buy your product as won't work on their browsers)

- Dumb down the UI and deliver in IE6 (workable for some projects, but not for many - some products really do need a rich UI. Especially not doable when porting existing rich client/server app to being webbased - clients don't like backwards steps on the UI)

- Develop in Flex

So it's all well and good saying people yelled 'iceberg' but really you're between a rock and a hard place, and even with this news I'm sure most Flex enterprise developers would make the same decision again - because there really weren't many alternatives.

Um, point 15 has 'Don't tell me there's a problem without offering a solution. '

He's not 'mocking' the predictions, he's providing a compelling, well thought out argument as a counter to a prediction, particularly interesting due to his neuro background.

With icloud, I'm really hoping for shared saves on games between devices. Ie I play a game on my iPad; then when I grab my iPhone I can pick up the same game where I left off.

Agreed - I'm voting less. Voting seems to have less 'point'. Previously it would feel like voting was (in a minor way) helping the community, by helping to point out to others comments that deserve reading. Now only the comment writers see the score, it feels voting up is only to 'reward' the writer with a bit of karma. To me it devalues what karma is about and makes it feel very selfish. Its lost its value to the community. Whilst karma influences the top comment, this doesn't seem enough to make it valuable enough to vote regularly.

It's like removing karma on articles, and saying 'if you don't have time to read the articles and evaluate for yourself which ones are good or bad why are you even here'?

For me there are a number of answers to your question:

- I love HN because I get to learn about lots of stuff I know very little about. For example I'm a business guy not a progammer, but I love to learn more about the non-business things. I genuinely can't judge the 'good or bad' on my own on some of this stuff. The karma gives me a quick and simple way of the community - this wonderful, intelligent community - pointing me in the right direction.

- It also shows where my comments might be off base - not because my comments karma is high or low (which I still see) but because I can see if the counter arguments are rated highly. For example I can't see if your comment is highly regarded or not. If was +40, compared to +1, I'd be more likely to think 'hmm, maybe I'm wrong on this after all'. Sometime is not just the power of the argument that changes minds, it's the weight behind it. I can't see that weight now.

-sometimes I quickly browse HN with some minutes of down time. Sometimes I read in depth. I now feel I'm being forced all the time to read in depth. Whilst that sounds good, in practise for me it isn't. Instead of more in depth reading I'm just cutting out the browsing, so I feel ultimately I'm getting less out of HN.

Personally I'm really missing seeing the karma on comments.

Fundamentally, removing them has changed the balance of what karma is all about. Karma previously had a function for the reader. It highlighted and bubbled up the good. It showed where there were good counter points. Now...well it's just for the account owner. It feels just like it's there for your own rpg-levelling style dopamine hit. It feels pointless.

I really feel this is a mistake. Comment karma had a function for readers, not just for account owner's inner satisfaction. This role has now been lost. It's making browsing comments - especially for very popular topics with lots of comments - much harder. I'm skimming a lot more or actually skipping the comments altogether because I don't want to read them all to find the goodness. It also means people can't learn from others what is or is not a valued contribution.

So I really hope this will be reversed or at the least make a better way (more than just what is the top comment) to make karma benefit the community not just the individual.

Not just moving your head...you'll also get the effect from moving just the iPad. Will be interesting how much of the effect holds up from just subtle movement of either.

I work for a company that specialises in scheduling software - our main market is healthcare, where this 'do we have the right staff?' question is key.

It's a completely different ball game from simple 'this person is doing this' scheduling. You essentially have to understand the demand - not just number of staff of different types, but complex skill requirements; lots of info about supply (staff - their skills and various other bits of info that rules need to know about) and then have a rules engine that matches them together and can check for items like working too long in a row, or too many weekends, or whatever - all parameter driven as every manager wants different things.

When you get this right - ie proper 'demand driven' scheduling - this is where the real benefits of scheduling software vs excel or paper come in. Instead of simply answering 'what is everyone doing' you are answering 'do we have the right staff - and if not, what is going wrong?'

But a word of warning - it's a nightmare to get your product there. The devil is very much in the detail. If you've modelled the demand as three shifts, but some people fulfil the demand working 12 hour shifts, how do you show that all matched up? How from a ui perspective do you assign shifts in a way that prevents over staffing and understaffing? How can we model the demand in a way that allows for flexibility but isn't a massive pain to create for each schedule?

I think you've done a good job of a simple and straightforward scheduling product that is affordable. Be careful about going down the rabbit hole of demand and rule driven scheduling. It sounds like a quick bolt on but actually you need to build it from the ground up with that concept in mind to really make it work.

Good luck!

A number of people here pointed out that the writer's original claim to be false positive proof simply because he'd used the tool for a long time was ridiculous. Unfortunately for him he's learning this the hard way.

"The findings are false-positive proof since I have used the tool that discovered it for six years now and I am yet to see it misidentify an item throughout the years."

I submitted an article yesterday about how it's peers that influence children not parents, and there was a very relevant quote:

"Developed societies have a special age group for people who are no longer children but are not yet adults, and this group becomes a source of social change. In societies that have only two age groups, children and adults, a culture can go along virtually unchanged for generation after generation, but as soon as there's a special age group for teenagers, things start to happen. The teenagers look for ways of demonstrating their fealty to their own age group ways of showing that they're different from adults. They use weird forms of adornment that adults find unacceptable, and they invent new words or use old words in new ways. If people didn't keep graduating out of the teenage group and taking their vocabulary with them, eventually they would create a whole new language and the adults wouldn't be able to understand them. Which, of course, is just what they're after!"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2298961

Judith Rich Harris's research started with a seemingly preposterous null hypothesis: "How the parents rear the child has no long-term effects on the child's personality, intelligence, or mental health." But the evidence does not refute it. The evidence she presents is both fascinating and compelling, and is a great example of following the scientific results rather than what you assume to be correct.

The fugue set is great. I paid not so I didn't have to attribute but because the creator so clearly deserves it.

Exactly, it's as much about communication and presentation as it is about your actual business model

It seems like part of the problem with procurement was not clearly illustrating that a discount had been applied after all.

PM: Well I’m going to need some kind of discount. How about 30%?

Me: As it says on our website, we don’t discount.

PM: But I’m buying 400 seats!

Me: Yes, and we already provide a nice discount for bulk orders, which is already included on the invoice and documented on the website.

I.e. he was wrong to say 'we don't discount'. The answer is actually - 'yes, I've already applied your discount. Because you are buying so many seats, you get our discount of x%. If you bought another y, you'd get z%'. Sounds like it could have been communicated better.

>Other video services begrudgingly make the leap and start encoding their video in WebM format to support a growing number of users.

Or they just support those users instead by serving them Flash - which they have to do anyhow to support IE6/7/8 and Firefox 1/2/3, avoiding the hastle and cost of more video encoding and storage. And none of the rest then happens.

Apple didn't previously have Flash support in iOS and then remove it... taking something working out for ideological reasons is much worse than never adding something in for ideological reasons in my book.

It's all well and good to focus future effort on alternative technologies that you have a preference for.

But to remove a feature you currently support that works well...that's a poor decision that doesn't help your users or the web in general.

More like "Scroomz is ignoring twinkies like Yooka ignored the tree."