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thenomadon Why are successful professionals still working 70 hours a week?

"No one died regretting time no spent at work"

Citation needed.

Here's one example of a situation where I could very easily see someone regretting not spending more time at work.

As a professional creative, I'm betting there are a fair number of authors, film directors, screenwriters and so on who died regretting they didn't finish their latest work, or didn't spend more time on the thing they really wanted to make. That's work.

thenomadon Family fun with deepfakes

It's intent and emotion that I'm really interested in - which to the best of my knowledge, computer generation still isn't good at. (This is for VR games, so high quality voice acting is a priority)

Hence, if I could find a program which could reliably turn one actor's voice into another, I could use their acting ability, but with more characters and less requirement for them to "put on" voices. That's powerful because really good actors are thin on the ground, and also because trying to hold a different voice or accent can limit the quality of the main performance.

thenomadon Family fun with deepfakes

Is voice conversion via ML possible yet?

I know we can create vaguely convincing synthesised voices, but I've not run across a program which can take my recorded voice, and convert it to a celebrity, or even shift apparent pitch or gender convincingly.

thenomadon 3,500 Occult Manuscripts Will Be Digitized and Made Freely Available Online

I suspect I'm one of the few readers here (@cstross being another) for whom this is genuinely important professional information. And it's fantastic.

Sadly no mention of license there, though - kinda vital if one is intending to use some of the imagery in remix works - although given the texts are thoroughly out of copyright I'd assume that's not too big an issue.

thenomadon Oculus Start: Technical and Financial Resources for Beginning VR Developers

It's also extremely good for RPGs and MMOs, neither of which are unpopular genres.

We haven't seen a lot of either yet, because both require considerable investment, but the first VR MMO, Orbus, is going very well, and Skyrim VR on PSVR is one of the first VR apps to really sell headsets.

(My own VR RPG also did very well, and convinced me it's a great use of the medium.)

thenomadon Who the Hell Uses Onion Juice?

This approximately describes my approach to game development, too. It works exceptionally well there as gamedev is all about crafting a fantasy and an experience.

thenomadon Ask HN: What's the best thing(s) you shipped in 2017?

My Dark Souls inspired VR horror/RPG, Left-Hand Path, which exited Early Access last month:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/488760/LeftHand_Path/

It's held at mid-80s positive reviews after that, and numerous people have said it's the scariest thing they've ever experienced in VR. A good start to what I hope will be a long career making VR games.

thenomadon Monitoring Home Power Consumption for less than $25

Dumb question - what's CPL?

thenomadon Machine Learning 101 slidedeck: 2 years of headbanging, so you don't have to

This is a deeply unfair, unreasonable and arguably abusive comment.

It's entirely reasonable to talk about yourself and your achievements on your resume, and Mr Mayes' site is rather a good example of doing so.

thenomadon Ask HN: What software/service helps you be an effective remote developer?

This is good advice, but one question: why is the default assumption here that I'm the only person I ever record?

I'm pretty good at not um-ing too frequently (20 years of public speaking will do that), but I can't exactly require all my guests for podcasts or interviews, for example, first rigorously train themselves for months!

thenomadon Ask HN: What software/service helps you be an effective remote developer?

On the subject of "ums" - does anyone know if there's a tool out there to automatically remove ums and uhs from spoken audio?

Seems like it'd be a useful and comparatively doable problem to solve.

thenomadon The compelling case for working less

You might find looking into this question interesting.

It's not universal, but a surprising number of the greats in all fields work less, not more.

thenomadon Show HN: SpeechBoard – Edit Podcasts from the Transcript

I just discovered https://trint.com .

No idea if they're any good, but they're certainly cheaper than Rev.

thenomadon Show HN: SpeechBoard – Edit Podcasts from the Transcript

I've said this a few times but happy to say it again: I will very cheerfully pay for a good podcast -> transcript service.

I speed-read. I don't speed-listen. And my lifestyle has zero podcast-compatible travel time. So there's a whole world of great content in a very user-unfriendly format for me currently.

thenomadon Burn the Programmer

Goddamn, that really does sound sinister as hell.

thenomadon Burn the Programmer

Hah! That's an interesting idea. I might just think about doing that for an April Fools' or similar...

thenomadon Burn the Programmer

If people enjoyed this post, you might be interested to hear that the author (me) is currently doing an AMA over on Reddit, too -

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7c1y9q/im_hugh_hanco...

thenomadon Burn the Programmer

OP and writer of the article here.

I'm embarassed to say that I wrote Postfix when I meant Sendmail! I might just go ninja-edit that now :)

thenomadon Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

That will change now that it's at the top of HN, but I agree - it's currently very obscure to search engines.

My guess is that it's a new site? Only a few articles, and Open Site Explorer reports a Domain Authority of 18, which is approximately equal to zero :)

However, if the author keeps writing these articles at this level of quality, chances are in a year it'll dominate relevant SERPs.

thenomadon TransferWise announces $280M investment

Because they'd have to talk users through allowing direct APK installs, complete with all the scary warnings.

That's going to reduce the number of customers they get a lot more than a redirect to the Play Store.

thenomadon Ask HN: I would pay X for Y

You might like Eurasia Group's "Signal" - https://medium.com/signal-geopolitics-made-simple/saudi-andr...

thenomadon Ask HN: I would pay X for Y

I would pay $5 to get a text transcription of any podcast.

My life doesn't support podcast-listening particularly well, and yet I know there's a lot of good info out there in the audio world.

thenomadon Google, Facebook, and Amazon have fundamentally transformed the web

A quick Google tells me that Andre's currently at the #2 position on Google (at least in my search bubble) for "The Web dying", #4 for "The Web is dying", and so on. And of course he's at the top by a country mile for the exact article title.

Hacker News regularly dominates Google queries, and Reddit does too.

I do agree that the statement that search engine rank is all misses a rather significant element, that being virality / social reach.

If you can regularly gain enormous traffic from Reddit, Facebook, or even HN, you don't necessarily need search engine rankings. If you can afford to pay for ads, likewise.

It's if you're in none of those three camps that you might as well not exist on the Web. Tree falls, forest, no-one to hear it, etc.

thenomadon Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

This is absolutely standard in the UK in all the supermarkets I'm aware of. If a member of staff doesn't know where the item is, they'll go and find someone who does.

thenomadon Show HN: Gutenberg – A static site engine as a single executable

Are there non-default ones? I also don't love Hugo's template engine.

thenomadon Training exercise boosts brain power, Johns Hopkins researchers say

Try some exercise in VR.

"Thrill Of The Fight", "Holopoint", "GORN" or similar games are a lot of fun and are at least a moderate workout. I've literally just finished a half-hour session of GORN, I'm fairly sweaty, and I wasn't bored once.

(I also recommend similar things in IRL with Actual People, but I'm aware that those tend to be both more intimidating and harder to fit into a pre-set schedule.)

thenomadon A 2017 Nobel laureate says he left science because he ran out of money

This argument seems like it needs some evidence behind it.

Where's the infinite supply of scientists coming from?

thenomadon Ask HN: Where would you host 100 small, customizable, static sites?

I've recently switched to Netlify and I'm very impressed. I may well end up moving most or all of my sites there.

A great choice for OP's usecase, I think.

thenomadon Anyone use a VR headset for dev work?

You'd be looking for BigScreen rather than Virtual Desktop for your use-case.

Having said that, echoing other commenters - the resolution isn't there yet. Maybe have a look at the just-announced 8k headset - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimax8kvr/pimax-the-wor... - which claims better text definition.

thenomadon Show HN: Calcflow, an open-source complex maths visualization tool in VR

Very neat tool indeed!

Is there a binary I can download and run? I don't know what version of Unity you used so I don't really want to compile myself if I can avoid it :)

EDIT - Answered my own question, it's available from here: http://calcflow.io/

I'd suggest you put this on Steam, folks - chances are you'd make your $100 Steam Direct fee back fairly quickly.