Hacker News Reader

"COVID-19's behavior has been quite simple so far."

What do you mean with behavior? People are still discussing how it spreads.

The latest news is it travels as aerosol and that in badly ventilated rooms keeping 1.5m distance is not going to help much. And also that the amount of virus particles you inhale determines how sick you get.

So it is only predictable when we know how it is growing exponential.

The still ongoing discussion about how it spreads creates uncertainty.

thdrdton Opinions I have formed about the “geospatial industry”

As far as I know Google also used third party data for their maps.

That's why the data can be different if you view Google Maps in the US or Europe. Some licenses are only allowed in Europe for example.

thdrdton 30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact

In my opinion the article is way to nostalgic. I have seen the images of the child houses. It was complete horror and super inhumane. I can handle a lot of bad stuff but those images have been haunting me for a long time.

Very very sad and I am happy a lot has changed since then.

thdrdton Blu-ray player keeps cycling on/off whenever plugged in

Hardware is software embedded in electronics so it cannot easily be changed.

But there are electronic components that can be programmed with software.

thdrdton Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

OpenCart and Prestashop are open PHP/MySQL shops with a lot of available payment provider plugins.

thdrdton Procedural Lake Village

Christopher Alexander wrote a lot of books with rules for building. He also said in one of his talks that he could imagine software that could generate a building (or the basic form) with the rules as constraints but with user input for the details.

I believe that would be great to have. And this post looks very promising that such software is possible.

thdrdton Procedural Lake Village

I think Houdini is a different kind of beast.

You have software like 3ds Max, Maya, C4D, Blender and others. And then you have Houdini.

But you can use Blender more procedural with the modifier stack. And there are great add-ons like Boxcutter: https://blendermarket.com/products/hard-ops--boxcutter-ultim...

thdrdton Genes, blood type tied to risk of severe Covid-19

My money is on the virus being an aerosol and badly ventilated indoor events accounting for most of the transmissions. There is growing evidence for this and also that the amount of virus particles you get into your system determines how sick you get (related to your overall health).

If this is true, social distancing wouldn't help us much but disallowing gatherings of people in badly ventilated areas would.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/opinion/coronavirus-super...

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-coronavirus-importanc...

https://youtu.be/SnI5ZsvvTrg

thdrdton Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

The alternative could a webapp. But this all depends on what hardware access you need.

In the end it is a choice of business model. Taking the risk of making money while being dependant on one party (Apple, Youtube) is always a huge risk.

thdrdton HEY’s UI is 100% HTML

Well I mostly agree this should be the first steps in building an app.

But there are a lot of areas where interaction with JS shines over form posts.

For example a form where a choice determines the next steps in the form.

This could be done with simple form posts but then you loose your scroll position or at least it will jump because anchors are not at the same position as your scroll position.

I believe JS is overused and most of the time Single Page applications could be Multiple Page applications with JS where it is needed.

thdrdton Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle

This is not complete true. Most combustion cars perform best around 90km/h. Below that speed air resistance is not much of an issue but gears help a lot getting the best performance out of the engine.

thdrdton Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after December 2020

As far as I remember it was difficult to re-implement because the Flash player was backwards compatible with all Flash versions. And this was also why there were so many security issues.

thdrdton Flow browser passes the Acid tests

Not an exact answer to your question but there are a lot of things taking more memory than you would think. Today websites contain high res images. Well, you might say, 800KB isn't much. But that is the compressed size. The bitmap data is way bigger. All this data has to be kept in memory.

But yeah, 8GB is unbelievable. I have no clue why Chrome needs this.

thdrdton Bicycles from Sketches (2016)

When I tried drawing portraits I really had to relearn how to look. In my mind eyes were positioned at the top of the head while in reality they are in the middle.

But when you draw cartoons it looks a kind if silly when eyes are drawn at the accurate location. And maybe this is the feature you mentioned. It's fun to play with it.

thdrdton The Center of the Pixel is (0.5, 0.5)

Exactly. For example a path tracer takes multiple samples between 0,0 and 1,1 to create anti-aliasing.

But what I also miss from the article: shouldn't the range of a pixel be -0.5,-0.5 to 0.5,0.5?

If you translate a pixel, to for example a LED on a screen, it makes more sense that it's location is the center of the LED.

thdrdton How to implement search-by-color when all you have is a good coffee

Vibrant.js [1] also does this.

It is nice to look into the source code to see how it is done.

But in my experience it works around 80% of the time because there are so many exceptions.

[1] https://jariz.github.io/vibrant.js/

thdrdton Spherical Solar Cells Soak Up Scattered Sunlight

It is also true that heat will add resistance to the electrical installation. So most of the time energy producten is way better when there is sun but it's cool.

Energy producten can be much better in spring than in summer for this reason.

thdrdton I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

Well the point is: it looks like we can go freely but only when we are not in closed spaces without good ventilation (and low humidity).

Studies [1] have shown that "20 percent of Covid-19 cases accounted for 80 percent of transmissions"

And those 20 percent were mostly 'Superspreading events'. We now know almost all those events were inside in bad ventilated areas.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/opinion/coronavirus-super...

thdrdton I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

More and more researchers start to believe that the virus (also) spreads as aerosols. They also believe the amount of virus that enters your body affects how sick you get. This might also be the reason that healthy health workers can get sick when they are exposed a lot.

So I have no doubt that working as health worker without enough protective gear is scary when you see healthy collegues getting sick.

But that does not mean that going for herd immunity is a bad thing. We know now that most people even don't know they have the virus when they were just exposed a little bit to it.

And if the virus travels like an aerosol it might even be true that the world wide protests that are going on in the open air won't lead to much more sick people.

But this also means that people inside a bad ventilated building are at risk.

Edit: an example of an article that explains this more in depth: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200527/aerosol-scientist-c...

thdrdton 25 Years of PHP

Most people don't know this and the timeline also doesn't make it very clear: PHP never started as a language but as a templating system for C.

Feature requests were quickly added and that's why PHP became a language with a lot of quirk's.

Today that is totally different. As a scripting language it is blazing fast. It still has some strange corners, but it's amazing that a templating system because such a wide used language.

thdrdton [dead]

From the original article [1]:

"That's not necessarily a problem. Netflix can produce a television series without confusing consumers, just as the military can train fighting astronauts without anyone mistakenly thinking the streamer is sponsoring such an academy.

Conflict potentially arises when trademark users begin trafficking in similar products. Imagine for a moment that a “Space Force” jumper begins appearing in retail stores. Who’s selling? The U.S. military or Netflix? Trademarks help clarify the source of goods and services."

So the US could also call it something like 'National Space Force' and the problem is solved.

[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/trumps-space-force...

thdrdton Evidence that blood type plays a role in COVID-19

Yes I believe too much zinc reduces copper intake.

thdrdton Evidence that blood type plays a role in COVID-19

"I'm taking Vitamin D, Zinc"

Why aren't governments promoting this? For most people it is relatively easy to get and it is already proven to have benefits. You can still get Covid-19 but it reduces the effects significantly. It is also safe to take but you should not overdose (especially with zinc).

thdrdton Blur Tools for Signal

2012: https://www.instantfundas.com/2012/10/how-to-unblur-out-of-f...

2017: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.00783.pdf (Pixel Recursive Super Resolution)

2020: https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/22/researchers-use-ai-to-deb...

Edit: Most face recognition software works by down-sizing and blurring an image to faster detect face features. So in theory it is very easy to detect face features from a blurred image. A deblur tool can then use this information to better deblur a face.

thdrdton Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

I was commenting on "I still do not understand, why you folks with Nvidia hardware expect it to work out of the box in Linux"

It does work out of the box for most people. Of course there are people with problems. But overall you can expect Nvidia to work out of the box. There are loads of people gaming (Steam) and CUDA programming on Linux boxes. So I don't understand why I should not expect Nvidia to work on Linux. To me it just sounds like a false statement.

thdrdton Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

I am not sure what you are talking about.

The Nvidia drivers provided by Nvidia work great. In Blender I got full CUDA support and even RTX raytracing support (RTX 2070 Super).

And as far as I know developing with the CUDA toolkit just works fine.

thdrdton Lenovo to Certify ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio for Linux

Some days ago I installed Ubuntu on a system with a RTX 2070 super. There were no problems at all with the Nvidia driver.

But it was a kind of miracle it worked out of the box. Because before that I had to manually fix the Wi-Fi driver.

Hardware changes sometimes turn into a hell on Linux (Ubuntu). But I still won't go to Windows or MacOS. I just like the freedom of Linux. And when things are working, most of the time they keep working. On an other pc I have over 6 years of Ubuntu upgrades and it is still running fine.

thdrdton SpaceshipGenerator: A Blender script to procedurally generate 3D spaceships

For those people who want to learn more about Blender here some lesser known YouTube channels with great content:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClUvUh2AoIhJRezjduP3xcQ

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzghqpGuEmk4YdVewxA79GA

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCREsnxg5H2HAj86KVREdGMw

https://www.youtube.com/user/mediagabbitt

https://www.youtube.com/user/Blenderfan93

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2U5mRfclG1Rrr1ztNkpGKA

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-6vHjpfo62aJpQk_n9siUw

Most of those channels show really professional work with great tutorials.

thdrdton The deepest ever sighting of an octopus, by cameras on the Indian Ocean floor

Not a stupid question.

And this Reddit contains multiple answers: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2n1yd4/how_is_i...

Yes, they get blind from white light.

thdrdton If Trump kicks out Twitter, there's always Germany

Trump is not going to kick out Twitter.

Trump is a smart man. He has trouble handling the coronavirus so the best thing he can do is shift focus.

I think this article adds nothing. In fact, if you take a closer look it just says: 'Trump threatened to close Twitter and Thomas Jarzombek invites Twitter to Berlin.'.