slackingoff2017

I'm not talking about real time though. Pre-recorded light field videos would already be high enough resolution. It might not be perfect but like the CGI nowadays close enough where there's moments you can't tell

As far as I can tell Magic Leap is working on light field technology. Essentially the big problem with AR right now is that it only fools half of the human visual system.

Parallax is one way your eyes estimate distance. All the AR headsets have this down.

The other is focal length. Your eyes need to set focus distance properly for the object you're trying to look at. This is where existing AR falls flat. And why it doesn't quite look real.

The way to fool the focal system is through bending light. Much harder than two offset displays. Not sure exactly how they're doing it but it sounds like they're doing something with optical fibre to project images on the retina itself.

The second hard part about faking focal length is that unless you can manage to bend all the light coming from the scene properly all the time you need to have really good eye tracking. Not sure how they're solving this either...

Whoever solves the focal distance part of tricking the human brain will rapidly develop AR/VR that is indistinguishable from reality. I just wish magic leap would focus on regular headsets to make some money instead of betting all their billions on light fields.

I appreciate other opinions which is why HN is so much better place than Facebook. Yeah I trashed it, it was bad for me. And I have a feeling it is for many others the same. And you might be right that I'm just a cynical jaded ass, I won't rule that out either.

However I think opinions can be dissenting, and even incendiary like mine often are and still contribute to or spark meaningful discussion.

And this is a difference in opinion I'm fine with. If I wanted everyone to agree with me I would adopt a vastly different writing style.

It is. But I don't like the idea of using a platform designed to hook you in. Everything is about "engagement". Facebook is not above messing with your mood and life outlook to get more eyeballs. If you engage more when you're really sad that's what you'll start seeing.

See this experiment: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everyt...

Facebook published a study on emotional manipulation. Creepy at the least

The key is that most services don't need to be reliable. I think the cloud has huge promise here. Engineers tend to think their app needs five-nines reliability when we live in a world where the banks close twice a week.

I don't think on-prem will ever die out. It's like owning vs renting your office. There's pros and cons to each and we'll eventually hit some kind of equilibrium.

This isn't universal, but prepare for a bunch of BS :). The bigger the company the less efficient they need to be to survive. Shenanigans and lazy work are often overlooked as individual contributions matter so little to the overall bottom line. Expect the need to be polite and at the same time tolerant of those who aren't. With big companies you end up with a few people that want white shoe behavior and they'll make a bunch of noise if they don't get it.

That said, it's very difficult to get fired once you settle in. You usually don't have to work too hard or too long. Pay and benefits are comfortable and work is stable if a bit boring or meaningless.

Your job satisfaction depends maybe 90% on your direct manager so make sure you like them during the interview. Your relationship and boss quality will make or break your enjoyment of your job most of the time.

I hoped to strike a chord with people currently using it for the same reasons I did. My post is partially self-deprecating and doesn't attack anyone specific. I'm sure there's people using the platform with no issues, and I think it's fine to criticize something for the behavior its built to induce in people.

I didn't delete my account but I let it go dormant about 4 years ago. Don't miss it a bit. Social media is all about making you feel bad.

Its a platform for people with low self esteem to dream about what their lives could have been. For older folks to remember the past. For the average guy/gal to keep tabs on old flames.

And most importantly a place for jackasses and rich people with various complexes to show the world how great their lives are.

And Facebook is great at figuring out your weakness. For me for example, Facebook became a window for re-imagining my life in college.

No thanks. The trip down memory lane is fun every once in a while but the old picture catalog in the closet has morphed into an insidious entity, always beckoning you back. My phone vibrates, someone posted a new picture of you from 5 years ago and 50 people like it. Remember that day? All those people. Dont you?

Fuck that, I'm done being screwed with by a platform designed to give you your fix.

And exactly the reason their engineers are treated as a cost center. Logistics and sales are more important than sound engineering.

Eh, I don't buy it :). Every company has sales, accounting, marketing. The thing that makes a software company special is their technology.

It really depends on the company. If your product is software then the CTO is in charge of your entire company minus ancillary functions and should definitely get a ton of equity.

If your startup sells shoes or something the CTO isn't nearly as important.

Hahaha that's the best 99 throwback I've seen a long time! Funny part is the web is just as influential as they thought it would be someday, just in a different way than many expected.

Seems like the hype cycle brings out all the crackpots. Once everything explodes businesses come in and start welding the pieces to existing processes. That's when most of the real potential is realized.

I think, unlike the author, I had pretty solid reasons why I didn't like it. Most applications are glorified forms on the front-end and Angular2 has the most rigid and difficult form handling I've used in a web framework.

Form validation is a long-solved problem and doing custom validation is a huge pain. Accessing the raw DOM sets off warning bells but in Angular2 it needs to be done for simple things like form field focus. You need to implement FieldValueAccessor for custom fields and the documentation for that sucks.

There's two different form libraries that are largely incompatible. Underneath that several ways to instantiate and manipulate both types of forms. It's so hard to build practical components that Angular2 Material still isn't finished.

If my company wasn't using ng2 extensively I would jump ship for react asap

It just happens that hard drives still have crap error correction. Probably because most of their failure modes are catastrophic anyways.

Part of it is also Sandforce. The flash to make SSD's existed a few years before they came on the scene but they were the catalyst. They created a sophisticated controller that could do very good error correction and wear leveling, allowing the first practical SSDs to be built.

Angular 2 kinda sucks. Simple oversights like not having a way to change focus on input fields leads me to believe it's run by crazy purists.

There's many other mistakes, like not having access to component state for custom validators and the infamous change detection errors. Sometimes the error messages border on horrific, reminds me of debugging assembly. Some of these issues don't have any good solutions.

The needless complexity is true. Like every bad framework it makes easy things difficult while at the same time piling on "magic" that's often not useful.

The author is dead wrong on Typescript. Typescript is the best tool I've added to my web development stack in years. Shortly followed by tslint. Once you get used to it the type inference is so good that you only need to even specify the type maybe 1/5 the time.

Opus is amazing. Also your DAC and phone sound processing don't matter when using Bluetooth. It's digital straight to the headphones

I think this is a short-term issue just because error correction is so good. We have many error correction algorithms that approach the theoretical limit for efficiency.

Eventually error correction will take more bits than it saves and the number of levels per cell will stall.

I would say our SSD's are actually much more resistant to errors than hard drives were. Because the error correction in spinning disks is generally crap.

With flash, manufacturers have been forced to include extremely good ECC schemes because cells die all the time. Since errors are generally random and happen in large numbers, the life of the drive becomes predictable instead of the death cliff we used to see with spinning disks.

Events and asynchronous operations are sufficient enough for a concurrency library to be built on top of JS with minimal changes. I wouldn't consider what JS has now a reasonable concurrency model but the asynchronous event handling could serve as a starting point for a source of events that run on multiple threads.

The difference is you're not concerned about where those come from. It doesn't matter whos water it is or where the power is coming from. And they're both simple commodities with few metrics.

We're trying to fit something that's generally very centralized into the same model. Where the servers are does matter. What OS they run and how reliable they are matters on an individual level. The environment your server runs on is quite important and it's definitely your server, not "any server will do" by a Longshot.

If the cloud was just some source of CPU instructions we would have a government regulated source of CPU power for everyone. But depending on what you're running ram size, cache size, network latency, CPU architecture, drive type, endless variables come into play that are all important.

Depending on hardware that you cant control to have metrics you definitely need to control is going to make the system less reliable, and that's what we're seeing now with cloud computing.

The "cloud" is a hilarious failure at the main marketing point. Decentralized just means you have no idea where your servers are.

Scaling is the only real selling-point of cloud and far more people think they need it than actually do

Why not just punish slow sites? It would have been a lot easier than the zillion hours spent building AMP and the caching system.

If AMP was so innocent Google would give users an easy way to disable it. It seems trivial to do, the fact that it's not in V1 says to me that there's ulterior motives.

There's more reason Google wants you to use AMP than "it makes the web faster!". That's just the sell. They REALLY want you to use it, enough that they don't want you turn it off. Maybe something to do with protecting ad revenue?

I heard that AMP was developed by people connected to the search team. And search team is probably another name for "AdWords cash cow team"

All Google had to do to fix this was move slow sites down in search results. Instead we ended up with this huge walled garden

Mostly because Google serves the page from their own servers and starts loading it before you even click a search result. It's great for Google search and bad for everyone else.

The AMP client source is available but worthless. Google validates that you're running their blessed version of the framework and if you change a single bit in the files Google doesn't serve your AMP content anymore.

It's a classic walled garden, like the Android app store. You can develop Android apps that don't meet their guidelines but you can't distribute them through normal channels.

Yeah, the main problem with LEDs is that you only get max efficiency if you can find something with the right bandgap. Right now that means deep blue.

220 w/lm is theoretical max for a smooth spectrum of white light. If you get to choose a spectrum you can get much higher using green centered at 555nm. If any "white" light advertises close or above 220 lm/watt the CRI suffers. It means they're using light that activates the human retina better but isn't actually a pure white.

Lumens are calculated based on human eye response https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminosity_function

Looked at this way blue lights are pretty terrible. But if you look at mw of photons vs energy input deep blue LED's are close to 80% efficient.

Roughly, if the average color of something is white your eyes will make it look white. Since we only have three color receptors you only need red green and blue in the proper amounts. The rest of the visible spectrum is naturally interpolated.

An approximation of white doesn't work for reflections which is the main reason this method isn't ideal. Real world objects can reflect different wavelengths very unevenly so even if these sources appear white directly their reflections take on a variety of strange hues.

The phospor spreads out the peaks so the light spectrum emitted is smoother, closer to black body radiation which is the type of light emitted by the sun. Humans are wired for sunlight so this makes things look better.

LED's are nearing theoretical max efficiency, somewhere near 220lm/watt for pure white light. Essentially the perfect light source. The most efficient white LED's are actually blue ones with a white phospor but it's still pretty close.

I wish we could do the same with sound and cameras, a place where our efficiency is still laughable theoretically and compared to the natural human sensors.

Too lazy to check my games right now but the Unigen Heaven benchmark was the first time I saw "tesselation", which used to be known as displacement mapping in software rendering days. Crank that thing to max and wander around a bit.

That's a very "get off my lawn" argument against Typescript :). You install it off npm and type one command to compile everything to JS, then you can pretend it doesn't exist.

It's like you're arguing against distributing a large number of files in a zip archive. Actually... that's what a jar is. They're not scary, you can just unzip them to see everything inside.