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It used to be one could drive over to it, and on a weekend people (not of the executive class) would be out picnicking or flying kites by the surrounding pools. There was a corporate-sponsored bonsai garden (appropriate for a company in the tree business) which was open to the public. That was in the mid-90s.

Interesting! Would https://news.ycombinator.com/classic get the "hide" treatment as well? (It doesn't currently.) Or perhaps one assumes one doesn't need to hide anything on the classic page?

It was a conversation at a party, and I fear I've even forgotten the author/teacher's name. She used the three "i"'s as a mnemonic. Thinking about it, I wonder if the sequence was actually "incident", "intent", then "inevitable".

The scheme is to write down what happened in the first pass. Then the second pass is to make things follow -- fix plot holes, clarify motivation, iron out chronology, etc. The third, "inevitable", pass is, of course, key. It is to hide the seams, to make the story/book appear as if it came whole cloth.

One (counter) example would be Faulkner's first novel, "Soldiers' Pay". In it you can see the hand of the author, self-conscious characterizations and manipulation of scene. It's educational to read, as it clarifies his technique in a way that his accomplished and inevitable-seeming books obscure.

This has some relation to the "Disney Method" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_method) where one delays self-criticism until after one has engineered out the problem, and delays engineering things out until one has dreamed up ideas. Of course the Disney Method is cyclical, and requires returning to the dreaming-up state and on from there.

This also reminds me of how 35mm street/photojournalists work (see, for example, Garry Winogrand, or Josef Koudelka, or Robert Frank). One makes tens of thousands of images, culls them down via work prints to hundreds, then choose a few dozen to print well as the final work. The final images appear inevitable, though it's unclear if there was something magical in the moment of the photography, or the culling process is the secret. See http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/robert-frank/the-... for an example of Robert Frank's contact sheets and how he homed/honed in on an image.

EDIT/ADDITION: A fiction writer I met teaches her students to make three passes at their work. As I recall, she described the first being for ideas, the second for intentions, the third is to make it read as inevitable.

My StarTac did actually detach at the flip sometime in 2001. Still usable for months after, though. If I recall, there was just some sort of bus cable between the two pieces. I would have to hold them next to each other to make calls.

This is certainly a Matryoshka doll of wrappings:

- At root there is dcraw [1], which is Dave Coffin's sometimes inscrutable but massive and high-functioning CLI utility to read virtually any raw file from virtually any camera.

- On top of this, we have LibRaw [2] which "librarizes" dcraw so it can play nice with other C programs. LibRaw is big and complicated (like dcraw) but incredibly helpful.

- On top of that, there is rawkit [3] (with which I wasn't formerly familiar, and looks interesting), which provides a Python cffi interface to LibRaw.

- And now we have a REPL built on top of rawkit!

Somewhat perversely, I hope someone makes a CLI interface to rawkit, and then we could call it, er, dcraw?

One caveat here is that dcraw and its prodigies, though amazing, do just the initial steps in tuning up a RAW file -- the demosaicing and just a few other niceties such as white balance. If you want to process the image in a sophisticated way (e.g. curves, local contrast adjustment, shadows/highlights, sharpening, masks, etc.) you'll need to switch to a different tool, such as darktable [4] or RawTherapee [5]. Or use ImageMagick, as mentioned by another commenter.

Note that darktable now can be scripted via lua, which could be another source of flexibility. And also that darktable ditched LibRaw for RawSpeed [6], which is more elegant than LibRaw, as it was written from scratch as library to load RAW files (and do nothing else), rather than, like dcraw, accreted over the course of many generations of digital cameras.

1. http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/

2. http://www.libraw.org/about

3. https://rawkit.readthedocs.org/

4. http://darktable.org/

5. http://rawtherapee.com/

6. https://github.com/klauspost/rawspeed/tree/develop

All this progression rings true, but also the initial attraction of Perl. Back in the late '90s I used Perl at a job where everyone else worked in C. This was in the days that programmers of compiled languages were skeptical of interpreted languages. One day a friend invited me by where he worked, where the sysadmin was a "real computer guy". The sysadmin turned out to be a man with long hair and a long gray beard. He was using a very thin Sony laptop with Linux and a command-line TTY (he said he'd never bothered to install X-Windows) and after he deployed a new release of the company's code using a single command and started nmap running on the internal network (he wanted to see who else was running a Unix), he asked me what sort of programming I did. I was a bit cowed, and apologetically said that I didn't really program, I only did scripting in Perl. He looked at me in the eye for the first time and said, "Perl is most bodaciously a real programming language."

Seeing Perl 6 release notes like "Use of EVAL now requires a declaration of ‘use MONKEY-SEE-NO-EVAL’" and "Non-digit unicode characters with a numeric value (½ and such) can now be used for that numeric value" reminds me of the nerd coolness of Perl, so different from the straightforward sensible air of Python. I don't see many deep-hacker sysadmins these days, but I hope the excitement of Perl 6 can inspire some inefficiently marvelous coders...

There's a lot to untangle here, and in your article. The supply/demand question reminds me of a seeming paradox about gentrification -- that a young professional (or artist) who moves to that up-and-coming neighborhood appears to be the one at fault, making the place more expensive, creating more churn, becoming another patron for the lifestyle shops. Similarly, it's tempting to blame the adjunct, as you suggest -- that by accepting the adjunct jobs they allow the system to survive. Your article also suggests blaming the careerist tenured academic for moral compromise: "The cost to the individual who manages to get tenure is low but the cost to the field as a whole is high."

While I share your moral outrage, I see these phenomena -- whether the dilution of academia or the dilution of vital neighborhoods -- as a series of top-down structural choices. That gentrification is the result of opportunistic investment and regulatory capture of local governance. That starving adjuncts and uninspired professors are the result of a devaluing of a liberal arts education in the name of a bottom-line STEM/entrepreneur-centric view of what is valuable to society. That a get-your-act-together chiding of those screwed won't correct a system willfully rigged to take advantage of the idealist.

All this to suggest that we shouldn't blame the victim, whether that is the adjunct or the badly taught and overcharged student, for having hope in teaching, learning, and an uneconomically rewarding practice.

At last report Bret Victor's research is supported by these folks: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-...

It's a hard question, what you ask -- should the techno-aristocracy pursue worthy causes, while the rest of us toil to enrich them? Is the world so fundamentally unfair that we're stuck without autonomy, doing tiresome tasks for corporations which don't even offer us basic economic security in return? Much less the opportunity to improve that world?

There does seem to be an option, at least early on: Labor for those who respect neither their employees nor customers. Or find/create energetic work which can make us and our surroundings better. Either decision feeds on itself. The first path limits options, the second gives some chance for things being better.

But I don't want this to be a blame-the-victim argument: that your father made a poor early career choice, and that Bret Victor chose wisely. But one element of Victor's argument is that our career choices (if we have them) have consequences for the world as well as ourselves. If we can find work which is not cynical and destructive, it may make the world better, and even set a good example. If we struggle for work which is emotionally, financially, and creatively unrewarding, then we're suggesting to others that that is the world, and they may find it easy to make similar choices.

The recent essay (by a presumably enfranchised techno-aristocrat) https://medium.com/@ystrickler/resist-and-thrive-1d36819853c... covers a similar territory regarding career choices, also pre-supposing that we have some autonomy. An argument there is that the initial choice is harder, but the consequences are easier.

Or compare in literature, to Victor Pelevin's (somewhat dystopian) novel Omon Ra's "highly complex automated systems"...

> is this implementation very different from having a 16-bit ADC in normal sensors

16-bit ADCs increases tonal granularity in the readout, which can help in the darker tones. A sensor site may be capable of differentiating about 12 bits worth of meaningful information, hence there's a good argument for overshooting that in the ADC. Our eyes, even if not sensitive to more than 8 bits worth of tonal gradation, are perceiving in a logarithmic space (vs. the sensor recording in a linear space), hence extra information in the shadows can be quite good. Plus the extra bits give more room in which to tune a captured image. An article such as http://www.scantips.com/basics14.html gives a rundown on this.

The extra bits don't help if the incoming light exceeds the sensor's recording capacity, hence the interest of this "modulo" discussion for over-exposed images.

The Times (as of 2008) was explicit that they had two stages for online publication (see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/washington/11askthetimes.h...).

The "Continuous News Desk" correspondent quickly write an article, in consultation with reporters. But the final draft of the article -- for print publication -- could be entirely different and with a different byline. I'm wondering if the techraptor reporter is noticing not a conspiracy to editorialize, but rather the difference between the breaking news story (just-the-facts) and a semi-considered story (context).

> By then, the military had constructed a mock-up of the compound in Abbottabad at a secret former nuclear test site in Utah, and an elite Seal team had begun rehearsing for the attack.

Question: What former nuclear test site in Utah? Am not familiar with tests in Utah. The model seems to have been in North Carolina? See http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/10/satellite-images-captu...

Absolutely! I'm a big fan of VectorPark interactive work http://www.vectorpark.com/. It's algorithmically created, yes, but also cleverly drawn within the algorithms. And more so, there's a sense of wonder and surprise and beauty to this work. It takes a really particular sort of artist/coder to pull this sort of thing off -- technical virtuosity while retaining an imagination. All too often the technical mastery required reduces subsumes the emotional range of the work...

Indeed, Paglen's been great on this. See also his Cabinet article http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/24/paglen.php which goes beyond NRO to other beloved organizations (e.g. "a secret Air Force Base near Groom Lake).

Thank you! That's great to see it laid out that way. Wonderful (at least from the point of view of someone not having to solve all these situations) to see email described as a problem which requires such continual and skilled care. I guess it's still a problem which scales (witness all the FastMail subscribers, myself included), but may not be the model YC-style business, at least as it currently stands?

Question for brongondwana: was there a discussion about how much to reveal about Fastmail's inner workings? That is, when do articles moves from discussing best practices (and already open source code) and into revealing trade secrets of running a top-quality email service?

Not to be totally grumpy here, but this is classic mathematicians-think-art-is-images-looking-like-famous-art. The expanded "starry night" isn't an interesting painting, of course. And it adds nothing to Mr. V. V. Gogh's work. It just mimics aspects of the extant work, in a spatially naive manner (e.g., what more do we learn except that the new rendition exists on a black mesa surrounded by more village-with-church?).

SIGGRAPH-style research shouldn't validate itself merely because it teaches the computer to adopt a cliched mode of image-making.

And there's the narrative as told in the (much recommended on HN) book "Command and Control": Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon administrations all arrive outraged at the military's nuclear war strategy. And then after much attempt at reform, they leave with virtually the same strategy intact. Partly just due to getting draw into the military's way of thinking, partly due to not being able to present compelling alternatives to the military command. And then when changes do happen, they are driven bottom-up by particular events/catastrophes which make clear that the current strategies are utterly untenable. It's tough to a replace one leaky abstraction with another (potentially leaky) abstraction!

Slightest nitpick...a missing hyperlink due to handcoded (?) html in lines 240-41:

   <xa href="relres.html">tough and ambitious</a>

The Fairbanks Scales in the 19th century were famously reliable and durable. Sadly, for the Fairbanks, to the point that once one was bought, there was little need to replace it. The Fairbanks brothers (who lived in Vermont, not Alaska!) became fabulously wealthy. But their company is largely forgotten, due to it saturation the scale market within a generation or so....

This may be superficially true, but the long-term health of the institution and the educational system are not served. Hiring underpaid adjuncts as teaching labor may allow for some good classes--either through the adjuncts' idealism or their hunger to keep their job--but it's only a sort of local maximum. Those good adjuncts came up through a system which valued teaching & knowledge. It's not clear the succeeding adjunct-taught generations will maintain this faith in their fields.

See the case study of Schlitz in the 70s (e.g. http://www.beerbusinessunplugged.com/?p=130 for a short version): desperate businesspeople go for short term gains by cannibalizing their traditional ways of making things.

In Iceland (as of 2006) my recall was no security screening point for the airports besides Keflavik (the airfield for large international flights). Totally liberating and strange to walk right to the gate, then out the door and across the tarmac onto a small airplane. Am curious if this is still so. I took it as a sign of mutual trust in a small nation.

I should also say that I remember even in the 1970s being able to walk to the gate without a ticket (albeit after passing through a metal detector). Both that and the Iceland experience had the romance of air travel which is lost during the humiliation of large airport screening procedures in the U.S.

Also tapping within the text and typing quickly will also overwrite/insert...

This is key to say: this is more than a freedom of speech (or freedom of entrepreneurship) issue. It's a question of whether college classes should become commodities distinguished only by convenience of access (e.g. scheduling) and a rating from prior consumers of the class/professor. It probably doesn't help that the period during which students check out classes is called "shopping"...

There's something deeply conservative (in a grumpy old-school sense of the word) about trying to preserve a non-metrics based view of an education... Facebook's early days is, of course, also a subtext to this. FB was, of course, built by a comp-sci undergrad at an elite college who became fabulously wealthy by hacking friendships into data structures. Are we rooting for similar hacks going straight into the pedagogy?

Some of the defensiveness may come from professional pride... Teaching (and medicine?) is not as easy to rate as, say, a product on Amazon or an Ebay seller. Speaking as a sometime adjunct instructor at a research university, the "course evaluations" represent to me bringing corporate management theory to a theoretically more high-minded institution. As others have commented here, the pressure to publish lowers the priority of teaching for full-time faculty. Bringing in low-paid part-timers to teach is not a healthy response to this, and publicly rating/berating teachers is a band-aid on a situation already lacking in trust and respect.

In a healthy college of Yale's quality, course choices should come from competent individual advising of the students and student-to-student discussion, rather than from ratings and a scheduling algorithm.

This is also very tricky interpersonal advice. I used to tell college students not to ask for permission, but only for forgiveness. Then realized that this could be construed as advocating date rape.

Question: What is the innate security risk of using airport wifi? From the article's conclusion:

It takes just one mistake — forgetting to use Tor, leaving your encryption keys where someone can find them, connecting to an airport Wi-Fi just once — to ruin you.

I have a hard time imaging a world is with a huge crash in education. Does this mean fewer colleges and more students going into trades? Radically lower tuition? Fewer tenured professors, and more adjuncts and visiting professors with three-year contracts?

Speaking of the latter, there is the disruption of online course offerings. These are creeping in from the bottom, replacing introductory lectures, and working their way up. Online classes allow schools to take the already squeezed adjuncts and grad students and pay them even less to help grade/moderate the online variants. Meanwhile eating away at the consensus that education is a series of seminars amongst the wise.

The scriptability of Blender has been a big draw for me. It's pretty deeply integrated with Python. One can even use it as an interactive 3D front-end for a substantial Python script. That is, let the script create and manipulate the objects, and just use Blender to view what is happening. In Blender 2.4 it was possible to keep a script continuously animating the scene, something I found tough to make happen after the 2.5 overhaul.

Blender 2.4 also let scripts create UI components, such as entire control panels to influence the running script. The last time I checked in 2.5, this was either not possible or not well documented. But I'm not up to date on this.

I'm also not familiar for comparison with the scriptability of Maya or other tools.