Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/5172/juggalo-juggalette-facepaint-makeup-hack-beat-facial-recognition-technology <comment><USER2> The title of this article seems to imply that face painting was intentionally used among Juggalos to deter computerized facial recognition - of course we know that's not the case. Though to be fair, somewhere in the history of the practice, it may be argued that it was to throw off human face-recognition.

This reminds me of a sort of creative look into futuristic fashion I saw a bit ago:

[https://cvdazzle.com](https://cvdazzle.com)

Where the fashion of the future is made to be expressive while preventing mass surveillance.

<comment><USER3> Checked the cvdazzle site. Why do these models - and models on "high fashion" photos in general - look always like they feel deep contempt towards the viewer? Where did this trope come from? What are they trying to suggest? I don't get it.

<comment><USER4> They're trying to have a neutral face so it doesn't distract from what they're modelling.

<comment><USER3> But it's not a neutral face. It's a face of disdain and contempt.

This is a neutral face: [https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/a...](https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/article- inline- half/public/field_blog_entry_images/shutterstock_114522091.jpg?itok=a7EVvRFs)

And this is the face of disdain I'm talking about: [https://encrypted- tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSGkhmT...](https://encrypted- tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSGkhmT2x0fhKItaDSLmrBPiDSaHYt2TccXHGNV4_5aPWpXIsxlZg)

<comment><USER5> Especially to Western eyes, resting faces--some in particular--can often be interpreted that way because we're so used to forced smiles. This is particularly true for strangers because we don't have the experience to read their individual emotional expressions.

> So Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth, behavioral researchers with international > research and innovation firm Noldus Information Technology, decided to > investigate: Why are some faces seen as truly expressionless, but others are > inexplicably off-putting?

> ...

> The researchers enlisted Noldus's FaceReader.... The software...analyzes the > image and assigns an expression based on eight basic human emotions: > happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and "neutral."

> To establish a baseline, Rogers and Macbeth first had FaceReader assess a > series of genuinely expressionless faces. Those expressions registered about > 97 percent neutrality, Macbeth said...

> Then they plugged in photos of RBF all-stars Kanye West, Kristen Stewart and > Queen Elizabeth. Suddenly, the level of emotion detected by the software > doubled to six percent.

> One particular emotion was responsible for the jump: "The big change in > percentage came from 'contempt,'" Macbeth said.

Source: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and- entertainment/w...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and- entertainment/wp/2016/02/02/scientists-have-discovered-the-source-of-your- resting-bitch-face/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.934e6e0ade8e)

<comment><USER6> Re: forced smiles. I encourage other adults not to say 'smile' when taking a photo of their children. Their natural expressions are often funnier and more insightful especially years later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No they didn't.

"Juggalo face makeup is better at throwing off facial recognition software than intentional methods."

There's your headline.

God I'm so tired of intentionally-misleading headlines. Clickbait nonsense.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you. The Juggalos painted their faces but someone else discovered its effectiveness in fighting facial recognition.

FTA:

> According to Twitter user @tahkion, a computer science blogger for > WonderHowTo, Juggalo makeup outmatches the machine learning algorithms that > govern facial recognition technology.

<comment><USER9> While I think it's impossible to do with this crowd, because we've already been biased by this conversation, it would be interesting to run the phrases "Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition" and "Native Americans figured out the secret to a healthy lifestyle" (or some other positive association from a positively associated group) randomly across focus groups.

I _suspect_ people will come out with more problems accepting "figured out" for a negatively associated group than a positively associated one, even through I think the meaning of that wording is identical in both phrases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminded me of this, by JP Lewis in 2001

Lifting Detail from Darkness

[http://www.scribblethink.org/Work/Talks/dalmatian.pdf](http://www.scribblethink.org/Work/Talks/dalmatian.pdf)

This application sketch describes a high quality method for separating detail from overall image region intensity. This intensity-detail decomposition can be used to automate some specialized image alteration tasks. Our work was motivated by the movie 102 Dalmatians, which featured a dalmatian puppy without spots. Animal handlers determined that the obvious idea of applying makeup to the dog was not possible – evidently there was no suitable makeup that was both safe to the dogs and that would stay in place during normal dog activity (including licking). This left Disney TSL with the task of painting out all the spots on the dog every few frames (the paintings were carried for a few frames with a simple scheme). The spot removal task was larger than anyone guessed, and ultimately required a large number of artists (up to 40) working for eight months. The problem also proved to be more difficult than expected from an algorithmic point of view. As the spots often had visible fur texture, initially it was believed that there must be some simple compositing technique that could lighten these spots.

</comment><comment><USER11> More specifically: Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition tech trained on normal faces and trying to recognize normal faces.

While the black and white paint does seem to negate a lot of natural contrast human faces have – and on which the recognition of faces is currently based – there seems a lot of information left to recognize specific faces, especially when considering stereovision or even possible pulsed laser reflection / LIDAR based solutions (think long-range iPhone X sensor).

Even if the recognition of an individual within a database of millions yields too many false positives, the set can be further refined by considering other subject metadata, say geolocation or social connections.

While considering this, it's still important to not succumb to privacy nihilism. Not everything is lost, but it's hard to practice that when 'beating' facial recognition tech means "looking like a fucking juggalo" [1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17452411](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17452411)

<comment><USER12> Speaking of that, I already fed in data from a kinect of the infrared region of interest from a LBP cascade.

It works to identify the perceptual hash of the depth and contour of the face. It beats all makeup, completely.

<comment><USER13> I'll need some makeup artists from Star Trek TNG to help me get ready in the mornings.

<comment><USER12> Qa'pla

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Once this technique becomes more widespread, get ready for laws that make it illegal to fool facial recognition, similar to wearing masks, etc.

<comment><USER15> I would imagine there is a pretty strong first amendment case against such laws in the United States. Mask laws have been successfully challenged on those grounds (though sometimes the challenges have been unsuccessful).

<comment><USER16> Your bank will likely not let you in if you're wearing a hat or sunglasses.

"No shoes, no shirt, no service" has also been a thing for as long as convenience stores have been around.

Not that far of a stretch to think this will ultimately extend to face paint.

If you want true anonymity, just wear a motorcyle helmet everywhere. We still don't know who The Stig is.

<comment><USER17> > Your bank will likely not let you in if you're wearing a hat

I've never heard of this.

> "No shoes, no shirt"

That's health code, not appearance.

<comment><USER18> _> I've never heard of this._

There's a rap record label in the UK called "No Hats No Hoods", because of the ubiquity of that sign in certain parts of London.

[https://nohatsnohoods.bandcamp.com/](https://nohatsnohoods.bandcamp.com/)

<comment><USER19> OK, but it's not a thing in the US. I pretty much always wear dark glasses and a big floppy hat in the summer, and have never been challenged at my bank. But then, maybe that's because I'm that guy in that hat ;)

<comment><USER20> I'm American. I can confirm my bank has a sign that says "no hats, no hoods, no sunglasses" on the door. The enforcement seems lax; if you have certian skin colors at least.

<comment><USER19> Huh. Maybe I've just never seen the sign. Or maybe they don't have such signs in my sleepy little town. And then, there's the fact that I'm an old ~white guy, and everyone knows me. I mean, I have received mail with no street address. Just name, city, state and five-digit postal code :)

But here's the thing: Nobody except my ISP even knows that I use a VPN. Nobody knows that I'm interested in online privacy and security issues. Because I only get into that online, using VPNs and Tor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Face recognition technology is proving to be fairly (if not wildly) inaccurate when in the field: [https://pureai.com/articles/2018/05/15/facial-recognition- st...](https://pureai.com/articles/2018/05/15/facial-recognition-struggles- false-positives.aspx) It looks like the base photos are big issue, but of course there are other factors.

<comment><USER18> "Accurate" isn't a terribly meaningful description. We really need to talk about sensitivity and specificity. If you're looking for a very low- probability event (a terror suspect in a random crowd) then your facial recognition algorithm needs to have phenomenally high specificity to be useful, otherwise you'll be glutted with false positives.

This isn't a problem isolated to facial recognition - many cancer screening tests are worse than useless, because the harm of unnecessary treatment due to false positives outweighs the benefits of early detection.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are they still considered a gang via FBI's classification? Might be more a criminal act to be a Juggalo than to circumvent facial recognition.

</comment><comment><USER23> In case anyone is wondering "What is a Juggalo?"

[https://genius.com/Insane-clown-posse-what-is-a-juggalo- lyri...](https://genius.com/Insane-clown-posse-what-is-a-juggalo-lyrics)

Among other things, a Juggalo...

> He's a graduate He graduated from...well At least, he got a job He's not a > dumb putz He works for himself scratching his nuts

Given this, nothing would surprise me about any headlines referring to Juggalos.

</comment><comment><USER19> > People are constantly trying to come up with ways to work around facial > recognition technology using everything from rigged hats (if you're out in > public) to heavy pixelation (if you're online).

Why does "online" necessarily involve facial images? I've used this image[0] for several years. I did use a cropped and fuzzed version of this[1], for a while. And other images, for other personas.

0) [https://s3.amazonaws.com/keybase_processed_uploads/7c420e0c6...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/keybase_processed_uploads/7c420e0c6aaec5a59dbb540a2fe30805_360_360.jpeg)

1) [https://russia.wcs.org/Portals/32/images/News/Vladimir%20Ars...](https://russia.wcs.org/Portals/32/images/News/Vladimir%20Arsenyev%20foto.jpg?ver=2016-09-28-032154-880)

</comment><comment><USER24> Face recognition is a great example of a privacy-toxic technology thwarted by something like GDPR.

As soon as you cross the line from mass recording of anonymous images to recognizing individuals, even in a public space, you require consent.

The only problem is that the main users of face recognition, security agencies and government are not subject to GDPR - that needs to be restricted in a future version because today it wouldn't have been politically feasible.

<comment><USER25> > Face recognition is a great example of a privacy-toxic technology thwarted > by something like GDPR [...] security agencies and government are not > subject to GDPR.

Sounds to me like it is the opposite and implicitly condones its use by excluding those organizations. The larger the law-built divide between government rights and non-government rights becomes, the less likely any of us entrepreneurs will be able to counteract it. Next, people will be cheering a law that prevents people from developing facial recognition technology.

<comment><USER24> Not sure I understand your logic. We moved from a free for all to a significantly restricted regime for personal data. There is, for the first time, a continent-wide recognition of the social value of privacy. This was achieved despite gargantuan efforts to quench it by the affected interests.

And this is a bad result because it doesn't go to the politically impossible extreme? It's a foot in the door, we have a fighting chance for an universal right to privacy. That's the only way to restrict governments and the only way to get _that_ is to convince the general public that it'a a right worth fighting for. The GDPR is a massive step in that direction.

<comment><USER25> These are similar arguments the proponents of the Patriot act made, lauding the protection it provides and the great achievement in passing. Lots of people don't see this as a big enough issue for the sweeping changes that have been made, and to go from free for all to free for some scares people. We shouldn't confuse the universal right to privacy with the universal requirement for privacy. Not everyone wants the latter and it's not our role to "convince" them as though they are ignorant. Almost everyone agrees with the goals/intent of the legislation, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired as did its predecessors. They just keep doubling down instead of real pragmatic solutions such as actual enforceable statutes and education. It's so many failures on so many levels, but since it was done with the right idea it seems to get a pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So this explains why there's face-painted neo-barbarian tribal subcultures in cyberpunk settings.

</comment><comment><USER27> I hope there is a better solution than returning to the bauta.

Venice faced a related challenge (in a small city any passerby has a good chance of facial recognition) and it seems that their masks were sometimes used around the year for anonymity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Venice#Carnival_ma...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Venice#Carnival_masks)

</comment><comment><USER28> When did avoiding mass government surveillance become such a tame conversation topic?

</comment><comment><USER29> None of these 'hacks' work because almost all involve putting something on your face or your head.

I think the holy grail would be if someone comes up with a tiny device that you can wear on your ear, or around your neck, that emits something invisible and that which only obscures cameras.

That way, the humans interacting with other humans in public are not looking like clowns in makeup and having normal interactions, while obscuring and befuddling the big-brother cameras.

I tried to research this in 2015 and was told about infra-red ray emitters. Not sure if there's any truth to it, or if it's even possible. If any of you have made any progress on this and would like to collaborate, please contact me. Email in bio.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm surprised no one mentioned that you can actually achieve somewhat the same thing and still be mostly unnoticed for human eyes by attaching some infrared LEDs on a scarf, cap or goggles.

</comment><comment><USER31> It happens to trick current facial recognition systems looking for typical faces... but I imagine it would be well within the possibility to create a "juggalo" filter that simply adjusts the levels until the impact of the makeup is reduced enough to grab a face out of?

<comment><USER32> Per the article, if you instead rely on a depth map, makeup doesn't work. But it does prevent basic image recognition.

<comment><USER31> Right, depth mapping doesn't care about face paint... but I'm saying that even with basic image recognition you can probably correct for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> However the surveillance state still has: gait-recognition, shoe-recognition, and clothing-recognition.

</comment><comment><USER34> So it might thwart some newer learning algos, but I wonder how it would do against the more classical heuristically guided techniques that tend to look at more invariant characteristics like facial feature spacing and ratios.

</comment><comment><USER35> Facial recognition, how does it work?

</comment><comment><USER36> "juggalo" man its been awhile since I've heard that word....a long while.

</comment><comment><USER37> If you have to wear that much makeup, might as well wear a mask.

<comment><USER17> Masks obscure vision and proprioception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> reminds me of the book scanner darkly by Philip K. Dick.

The people had these suits to mask their face

</comment><comment><USER39> Seems like you could just wear a mask or a balaclava.

</comment><comment><USER40> Facial recognition is only "beaten" when a person's normal face can go undetected without looking like _a fucking juggalo_.

<comment><USER19> Maybe you can have advance air support. A drone with an IR laser targeted by a lens detector. But you'd need to avoid targeting people wearing glasses.

But no, that's silly. Really, you just need to give up on the idea of being anonymous in public. Because that was never something that you could count on.

<comment><USER40> If only there were some sort of light we could shine to wash out a person's face with, but have it only be visible to cameras and invisible to humans.

<comment><USER19> That would likely just flag you as someone trying to obfuscate facial recognition. Making you quite unique, no?

I have noticed that it's very hard to recognize faces of people with very black skin, under low-light conditions. So I can imagine black makeup that's 100% non-reflective across a wide range of wavelengths. But then there's millimeter-wave radar. How would one block reflection of mmW radar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Uhhhh, juggalos paint their face and it JUST SO HAPPENS that it beats face recognition sometimes.

I assure you there was little to no intellectual effort on their part towards that end.

Fucking magic. All in the motherfucking air.

<comment><USER42> Would you please stop posting like this and start following the guidelines?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER41> I've never broken a guideline here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> WOOP WOOP

</comment><comment><USER44> More like "stumbled into" than "figured out".

<comment><USER45> "Stumbled into" is the discovery mode for many major scientific breakthroughs.

<comment><USER9> It's actually a little amazing how many people are stumbling over themselves to point out how _one possible interpretation_ of the title that implies some credit is due to this group that people have a generally poor opinion of couldn't possibly actually have done anything useful.

This, people, is _exactly_ what prejudice is.

<comment><USER44> OR, as was my point, the title as written suggests they were actively engaged in efforts to evade facial recognition, which is a completely different story.

> This, people, is exactly what prejudice is.

You're reaching.

<comment><USER9> > the title as written suggests

That is _one interpretation_ (as I covered elsewhere in these comments, "figured out" is used often in to describe discoveries that were accidental in nature. Interestingly, rarely to people complain about the wording when it's a white guy from 50 years ago), and I the fact that people are both jumping to that conclusion here, are unwilling to consider their interpretation might be biased, _and_ feel the need to comment on this when it's already been noted and in numbers that I think are substantially higher than would be seen if the group in question did not have the same reputation, speaks volumes.

Is it actually so implausible that one of more people that consider themselves Juggalos (or associate with the group) notices they weren't being tagged quite the same way when in makeup, and investigated? If it's not so implausible, why is everyone rushing to point out it's probably not what happened, and if it _is_ implausible, why do you think that? I don't know whether the discoverer is a Juggalo. I suspect he's not, from his Twitter feed, but I can't be sure. I've had plenty of friends into similar tech scenes and also into some weird shit (and I've been to a Defcon in the early 2000's, which is all the extra evidence I need). The fact that so many people seem willing to _assume_ he's not and present that as fact (how many people clicked through to the twitter feed it to see if the person was associated with Juggalos?) in a refutation of the title (which only makes sense with that assumption), suggests something to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Police Shoot a man's dog in front of him, arrest him for video recording - <AUTHOR> http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/police-shoot-a-mans-dog-in-front-of-him-then-arrest-him-for-recording-it/

<comment><USER2> Reddit is that way -->

</comment><comment><USER3> What. The. Fuck.</comment>


Show HN: Year 2773 - <AUTHOR> https://aburbecondita.com/ <comment><USER2> The psychological effect of being a member of a formerly great civilization that has decayed in significance is not trivial. I wonder how societies deal with this "cultural status anxiety" through art.

Italians these days seem to emphasize how they are experts at "enjoying life". I wonder if this was always the case, or if this is in some sense a compensation for lost glory.

<comment><USER3> Portugal is interesting too. Lisbon, formerly a great port now a tourist jam packed nightmare.

I wonder if "new industrial" cities in asia will have the same artefacting 200 years

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OP, are you sure you were born in year 1986 Before Christ?

[https://roblesnotes.com/about/](https://roblesnotes.com/about/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll fix it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really makes you think. That's when civilization started, that's when humanity reached the peak of human glory from there on we only live in the shadow of what once there was.

</comment><comment><USER6> Tiny little bug: the Christian date system doesn't use a year zero. The year before A.D. 1 was 1 B.C.

<comment><USER7> I think the invention of zero is a bit later.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Socialmattic - Generate a mobile 'Like' page for your business - <AUTHOR> http://blog.socialmattic.com/how-to-generate-a-mobile-like-page-for-your-business/

<comment><USER2> Wasn't there a study conducted a while back that concluded most non-techies have no idea what to do with nor how to scan QR codes?</comment>


5 Book Recommendations from Dave Morin, Sunrise Bio CEO and Co-Founder of Path - <AUTHOR> https://blog.parrotread.com/5-book-recommendations-from-dave-morin-sunrise-bio-ceo-653a5059fe29 <comment><USER2> [http://jesuschristsiliconvalley- blog.tumblr.com/post/4653927...](http://jesuschristsiliconvalley- blog.tumblr.com/post/46539276780/a-cunt-and-his-iphone)</comment>


The Irish Brothers Behind Stripe - <AUTHOR> http://on.ft.com/1mhiSF9

<comment><USER2> While I know this is a fairly tailored interview/article, these guys seem awesome -- perfect example of non-egotistical extremely successful founders

</comment><comment><USER3> I hit the paywall.</comment>


Show HN: Formbuilder.js - <AUTHOR> http://dobtco.github.io/formbuilder/

<comment><USER2> I disagree with this type of form builder. In a previous job, we built lots of forms (for gov/banking sectors), had a formbuilder product, and used multiple commercial formbuilders too. They were all more complex but fundamentally the same: making you focus on layout and field types up front, not content. (think Powerpoint vs LaTeX)

What we needed, it seemed to me, was something that started simply with the list of questions the user wanted to ask, and elaborate on that, adding field types/lookups/help text after the fact. The type of response had to be something you could change without deleting the form control and replacing it eg; start with a text box. Change it to a date picker. Then change it to a selection when you realise that only Monday & Wednesday are valid answers. This kind of change happened pretty regularly, but is stupidly hard in most form builders.

The other mistake of allowing too much flexibility in layout doesn't apply to Formbuilder.js - but many products made it easy to design forms that were inaccessible, or that wouldn't work on different screen sizes, or couldn't be laid out well on paper (ultimately many of these forms had to be printed for archiving). The form builder should generate accessible layouts that worked on multiple devices, and very little of the layout should be in the hands of the end user.

A less visible aspect of what was wrong with form design was versioning the data model. A user may submit drafts of the same form several times, over many weeks (applications get rejected, plans change etc). Meanwhile, the regulations driving the forms would change, or bugs would be found, and the form would change. It's important to be able to load the old data in a new form, and not choke on validation failures. Particularly, if some piece of data is now missing that means large optional sections are no longer displayed, we should not lose the data that the user had filled in in those sections.

A final data model issue was that we were also creating xsd's for electronic submissions etc. At that time the best solution was to massage the data after form submission into a schema specified format; but this meant that validation code was essentially written twice (once in the form, once in the schema), and the two were out of step. I wanted to generate schemas for valid complete forms, and to be able to clean up the saved data (which may be out of step with the current form version, see last para)

Anyway it turned out all this was possible, but I was leading a different team from the formbuilder one, so they went with a more conventional design. Sadly part of this was commercial: producing complex forms layout-first is hard enough for non-techies that the company could offer this as a service...rather than producing a better UX :(

<comment><USER3> Coincidentally, I am working on a BSD-licensed form builder (as part of a larger project), and I found your comment timely and insightful. You may have unknowingly improved our form builder, so thanks :)

<comment><USER4> Can you point us to it please?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suppose I can be so audacious as to plug this here too: [http://minikomi.github.io/Bootstrap-Form- Builder/](http://minikomi.github.io/Bootstrap-Form-Builder/) for bootstrap forms.

<comment><USER6> Nice plug. Bonus for relevancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I will definitely be using this! I was just about to code my own for a project I'm working on. The ability to put the fields in columns would be great. An example would be to allow some to have two separate text fields, like First Name & Last Name, on the same line.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nothing shows up in IE 8, might be worth putting a supported browser list in the README.

</comment><comment><USER9> An open source Wufoo :) Cool.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yay a backbone.js article! No hate on Angular.js but that's mainly what I've been seeing on HN lately. I miss the Ember.js, Knockout.js, etc.js articles.

<comment><USER11> I actually wished it would have been built with Angular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems like this can easily be extended to add other non-input related elements like lists and such.

Then it can be renamed PageBuilder.js. Any plans to do so?

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks nice. Too bad it requires backbone and rivets...

</comment><comment><USER14> Add a new field is blank.

<comment><AUTHOR> File an issue? I'm not 100% sure what you mean, but would love to be able to solve this.</comment></comment>


StartupConference June 13. - 16. 2013, HVAR Croatia - <AUTHOR> http://startupislandconference.com/index.html New Europe is on fire!
From Austria to Russia, from Finland to Estonia to Turkey, this is one of the world's most exciting places to start, invest in and write about startups. Exciting projects and technologies coming from the region are bursting onto the global scene, while the young economies of these countries are offering unprecedented opportunities for growth and investment. Startup Island will be a unique event drawing together the regions startup community and ecosystem.
The conference will host not only the most exciting early stage projects but also the more seasoned startups which have expanded from Estonia, Finland, Croatia, Russia, Slovenia and other countries in the region. They now have global footprints, some investment under their belt and are hungry for more. Joining them, and co-organizing the conference, will be the accelerators, incubators, coworking spaces and other startup programs from accross New Europe networked in the Hacking New Europe initiative. <comment><USER2> Looks amazing, but unfortunately it will be very hard to come :(</comment>


Ask HN: Intro to Linear Algebra? - <AUTHOR>

I'm excited about Andrew Ng's upcoming Machine Learning class, but I know from the past YouTube videos that Andrew Ng has posted the course will be heavily dependent on strong knowledge of Linear Algebra.<p>I took Linear Algebra in college, but I don't remember any of it now 9 years later.  What is your favorite concise primer/refresher on Linear Algebra? <comment><USER2> [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear- algebra-...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra- spring-2010/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone else recommend the Khan Academy lectures [1], and I was thinking about using those.

[1] <http://www.khanacademy.org/#linear-algebra>

</comment><comment><USER4> Glibert Strang's _Linear Algebra and its Applications_ is a beautifully written concise introduction to linear algebra.</comment>


Starcraft II Launched Today (goodbye free time) - <AUTHOR> http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/launch?ref=/sc2/

<comment><USER2> Blizzard must not be up to the traffic. I tried to purchase the digital download. It errored out. Tried different browsers. Same thing. Tried calling Account and Billing support. Busy signal. The one thing you absolutely do not want to fail on a popular product launch is your digital purchases. I'm going to venture to guess that this is their largest product launch ever.

<comment><USER3> I got errors when I had spaces in my credit card number. Removing the spaces let me purchase. (true story.)

<comment><USER2> No spaces here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> Is Korea still alive?

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't let Kim Jong Ill hear you...

<comment><USER6> Wrong Korea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hear that if you pre-ordered it from Gamestop, you might spare your free time for at least another day.

<comment><USER8> Why? Has there been a shortage problem with Gamestop?

My little brother pre-ordered with Gamestop so he could get it at midnight, and there seemed to be more than enough copies for everyone when we went last night.

I actually pre-ordered my own copy from Amazon (Conveniently, it shipped from the Amazon warehouse in Nashua, NH to my house in Nashua, NH)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It feels strange to consider myself a hardcore gamer, with gaming PC, Xbox 360, PS3, etcetera, and to have never played the original Starcraft. Not a big RTS fan, I suppose, but I love most other genres. And yet here I am with a Wings of Liberty box sitting at my desk.

Read through the manual, especially the nine (!) pages they devote to the plot in teeny tiny text. For a newcomer it's extremely confusing. The Zerg make sense, but the constant shifting of Terran allegiances and Protoss character names make my head swim. IGN's five minute video summary helped, though I had to watch it three times.

I take it Kerrigan is the anti-hero everyone loves, vaguely like FFVII's Sephiroth. And there appears to be some slight debate as to whether there's any humanity left in her, though her temporary alliances appear to be more for strategic convenience than any real compassion.

What I'd like to know from my fellow HN gamers is the emotion of it. What were the shocking moments? The tearful bits? Were there any? What would I feel about Jim Raynor if I played through Starcraft and Brood War? Am I supposed to think Kerrigan as the Queen of Blades is sexy, or am I supposed to be repulsed by the... things growing out of her back?

<comment><USER3> The transition from the terran campaign to the zerg campaign in the original was the only real genius of the plot I felt. Leaving Kerrigan to die was one of the last things that happens before you start playing as the zerg. As the zerg, you have to guard this mysterious chrysalis for the first several missions without having any idea what it contains. It was a real "Oh Wow" moment when out pops zerg-Kerrigan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't do it, I just can't. I want to give in too badly.

</comment><comment><USER11> I feel a funeral for a distant but important relative approaching.

</comment><comment><USER12> I just went out during lunch and bought the collectors edition from best buy. Waiting to get home to open it ...

</comment><comment><USER13> goodbye free time hello bliss

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm going to wait till it is sold on Steam, if that ever happens.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone up for a game of Age of Kings?

</comment><comment><USER16> So this is the first launch of a PC game that is 60 dollars (base value)? Wow. Even xbox games that are also out on pc the same day are 50.

<comment><USER17> $60 for this particular release - I believe this release only includes the 'Terran' missions - subsequent releases, each $60, will include the 'Zerg' and 'Protoss' specific missions.

Thats what got me...I would have purchased it but the pricing out for each set of missions and removal of LAN play has made me postpone purchase...Shoot, I'll try to wait till it comes out in a 'combo' release in a few years... _I'll try!_

<comment><USER18> There is actually nothing but rumors and speculation about the price of the future expansions. Blizzard has said nothing about the price, so it is a little sensationalist to assume they will all be $60.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am confused as to why this is Hacker News.

<comment><USER20> starcraft 2 will gross $1Bn over next few years.

why is an oil spill related to hacker news? or why we buy airplane tickets? or wikileaks?

hell, if anything starcraft 2 is a factor of 10 more _relevant_ than any of those, you know, because starcraft 2 is _on a computer_

not only will starcraft 2 reiterate what a big deal video games are, it's going to shape popular culture, it's going to be played by millions of players each and every day for the next decade or so.

starcraft 2 is a game that values practice is thinking out of the box more than anything else, I know far more starcraft players amongst startups/hackers than settlers of catan, or anything else.

hell, nothing unites startups more than a good old lan party. (i'm aware of the irony of this point)

but most importantly, its related to Hacker News because over 30 people have said it is (upvotes)

<comment><USER21> >starcraft 2 is a game that values practice is thinking out of the box more than anything else, I know far more starcraft players amongst startups/hackers than settlers of catan, or anything else.

I love it when people say games value thinking out of the box. Yeah! My Zerglings can beat a Yamato Cruiser right? Because they can like jump off of a cliff onto it... or something. Every game has a tiered structure of what works and doesn't SC2 is no different. At competitive levels of play there's only a handful of strategies people use, they'll work them selves out over the next month or so and then be set in stone unless people find glitches in the game that don't get patched like the original SC. SC2 is a game of rock paper scissors at the core. Every strategy game is.

>not only will starcraft 2 reiterate what a big deal video games are, it's going to shape popular culture, it's going to be played by millions of players each and every day for the next decade or so.

You know every other pop music group is listened to by millions of people some for even 3 or 4 decades! Example Led Zeppelin, so how come Led Zeppelin posts aren't on HN? SC2 is entertainment pure and simple, essentially by posting entertainment links it's going against the spirit of the rules. It's essentially cat pictures. And you know those are big on the _internet_ which we're on, and that argument makes as much sense as your "on a computer clause".

<comment><USER22> You're right about SC2 reducing to a game of rock/paper/scissors, just like chess is a very simple game (not to mention Go). Yes, this unit counters that unit, which counters this other unit.. but there are quite a few units in the game, and adding terrain considerations and building/tech options (and the list of variables goes on) you start to get the situation where you can develop quite intricate strategies.

The classical example from Starcraft 1 is Slayers/Boxer, the Korean player who played as terran when everyone thought it was completely inferior, and developed new strategies that made him world champion.

Sure, you can snicker at it being "just a video game", but it's fundamentally no different from any other game or sport.

Even rock/paper/scissors can become quite interesting with just two more options, see: <http://www.samkass.com/theories/RPSSL.html>

<comment><USER21> My point was that it's entertainment. I know it's a video game, but essentially it's no different from any other entertainment. I mean we don't have World Cup or Superbowl Stories on HN, why have the release of Starcraft? I'm sure there are people here who keep up with sports.

<comment><USER23> > My point was that it's entertainment.

So? Why is the topic of entertainment a bad thing for HN?

> I know it's a video game, but essentially it's no different from any other > entertainment.

The only thing I can see that it shares with other forms of entertainment is that it entertains. And if we are wondering why we post things that entertain us on HN, HN itself would probably not exist.

> I mean we don't have World Cup or Superbowl Stories on HN, why have the > release of Starcraft?

If you honestly can't see a difference between the release of SC2 and the Superbowl, you're purposefully being obtuse, and if you are, your comments are hurting HN much more than a post about SC2.

However, I'll assume your just ignorant, and I'll explain the difference.

First, SC2 is a game that the users of HN have a higher chance of playing than they would have of playing in the Superbowl. Indeed, I'll go so far as to suggest that no registered user, yet, has ever played in any Superbowl.

Secondly, rather than simply be passive entertainment like the Superbowl, SC2 is a game we can actually play.

Next, their is a large following, and that following essentially evolved e-sports. People can laugh at e-sports all they want, but it's no different then watching real sports. Continuing on, the launch of SC2 today means the e-sports arena is essentially being revitalized. A sizable number of individuals are looking at how to capitalize on e-sports. Indeed, their are individuals actually making money casting esport games, or startups using esports to easily market via sponsorships of tournaments.

You see, the launch of SC2 isn't just a game. Why? Mostly because of the success of SC:BW in e-sports. So, unlike just another game being release, SC2 is different. It will present more opportunities for people to explore, and see how they can capitalize on the SC2.

In short, no. SC2 isn't just like every other game, and it is different from other entertainment. Indeed, it has more relevance on HN then your comments complaining about it's inclusion.

<comment><USER24> > Indeed, I'll go so far as to suggest that no registered user, yet, has ever > played in any Superbowl.

What about Peter Norvig?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pnorvig></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does anyone know how switch in PHP is implemented? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> meta: is it ok to 'flag' questions like this? I mean it's devoid of anything.</comment>


My pains and what's missing in e-learning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jiruto.com/what-is-missing-in-e-learning/ <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR:

My main pains in e-learning:

1\. Mapping topics 2\. Creating a syllabus 3\. Finding good learning resources 4\. Ordering and organizing the resources

<comment><USER2> and the call to action is to sign up and share about our learning path</comment></comment>


Privacy for Piracy. Exclusive Interview with Suren Ter from YouHaveDownloaded - <AUTHOR> https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2012/03/privacy-for-piracy-exclusive-interview-with-suren-ter-from-youhavedownloaded-com/

<comment><USER2> From the interview: "When visitors search for something on the website, there's a small pop-up that jumps out and offers you to "like us while you're waiting". That's an artificial delay. We can return results in milliseconds. The pop-up and delay was my idea just to collect more likes."

This is something I'd never considered before—I'm surprised more sites don't take this tactic for other (genuine) searching/loading delays.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same here -- it's brilliant, and not just for this but there are plenty of other possibilities extending this idea.</comment></comment>


COMPare: Tracking switched outcomes in clinical trials - <AUTHOR> http://compare-trials.org/ <comment><USER2> This looks like a good initiative. I look forward to the day that this can be done automatically.</comment>


Are 10-11 hour programming days feasible? - <AUTHOR> http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/01/13/229205/Are-10-11-Hour-Programming-Days-Feasible

<comment><USER3> This is the best quote from the comments:

 _Unfortunately, I see way too much of two kinds of people in startups. There are way too many dishonest owners and bosses who will take advantage of trusting geeks. After all, our skills are all engineering and software, not negotiation and conflict. On the other hand, there are way too many gullible geeks, and geeks who like so many beaten house wives are simply unable to grow a pair and stand up for themselves. Assuming you care about your employees, it's probably up to you to stand up for them._

That right there is the reason you see this question come up over and over in software companies. The plainly obvious answer, when asked to work 60 hour weeks as a matter of policy, is "Not just no, but hell no. It simply doesn't work. We'll do it (to your detriment) but you're going to have to pay us hourly while it's happening." But because of this unique combination of uninformed (or manipulative) management and meek developers, that answer never gets presented and the policy gets put in place.

If you see this start to happen at your office, stand up for yourself and your co-workers immediately. They won't put the policy in place if they know for a fact that the whole team will walk.

</comment><comment><USER4> Short answer in this situation: No.

Expanding a bit: The employees only gain in the most abstract sense by working longer to implement a bunch of features that are vaguely defined as to when and why. They get no extra money, no sense of worth attached to their shares, no bonus for doing the work.

This isn't about some "incentives don't work" crap either. It is pretty simple people dynamics: these guys work at a startup for a salary, they are not really in it for the big payout, they are in it for the job. Having to work absurd hours when there is no obvious benefit or need is a good way to create resentment. If it was a 2 or 3 week push to "finish this stuff and knock out a release" fine, but give them some relaxing days/paid time off at the end. That is what they respond to.

Further, the fact that the bossman thinks this unpaid indefinite death march is a decent idea suggests it is time for resume freshening.

<comment><USER5> Also, the fact that the bossman can obviously NOT think of any (better) way of getting new customers but asking his people to implement features and then hope to lure someone in sounds pretty bad.

Depending on country and social insurance and on your readiness for a "unique" company death-march experience, it might be something you want to do... but if you have any responsibilities in life then make sure you have some money on the side and get out as soon as you can.

If you can afford it, just for the hell of it, then keep your eyes and mind open as much as you can and observe what is going on around you.

What does your boss say, what things does he avoid or not say etc. All this might give you some interesting thoughts and views on "management" and people but most likely will leave you rather disillusioned and maybe even bitter.

Getting screwed over and/or taken advantage of is like losing your virginity: it will be hard or downright impossible to go back to "before it happened".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes, 10 or 11 hour programming days are feasible. They can even be productive, and not lead to burnout. __HOWEVER __for that to happen, it has to be programming that the programmers want to do, and they need to be given a lot of freedom in how they accomplish it.

Think of it this way--if a programmer won the lottery and retired, what would he do? Many would spend 12 hours a day programming on personal projects. If you can make work line up with those interests, then they might spend that kind of time on work.

This is hard to accomplish. All of the times I've seen it happen were spontaneous. That is, the programmers worked 10 or 12 hours a day without having been asked to do so.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. I find it useful to work one, _maybe_ two long days during the week to clean something up or catch up. But otherwise, I need to rest, and see my family, the rest of the time, or things are just going to go downhill.

I believe Ed Yourdon had a title that applies: Deathmarch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The best thing about 11 hour days at a startup is that you have absolutely no time be distracted by applying for other jobs! The worst part is that, by Thursday afternoon, you are afraid to touch your good early-week code with your wrecked head and retarded fingers.

I worked those, with a twenty minute lunch break, for 7 months, for not shitty pay but not good pay. At the end, we were asked to work for no salary, after everybody got super shitty performance reviews. We asked for stock and the CEO flipped. I quit, and asked him for my back wages, and he threatened to sue me for libel if I said they were owed. I lodged a court case and he back paid me.

</comment><comment><USER9> Like almost everyone else I'd say no, especially in the context of employees being asked to do so. I do think it's possible for short bursts, where someone is internally motivated. That's usually the "implementing my idea frenzy" sort of thing: you've worked out an idea in your head, and then have a big coding binge turning it into the first prototype. But it's really hard to call that up on command as an employee assigned programming tasks, or keep it up long term (at least in terms of being _productive_ for those long-hour weeks... it's quite possible to "work" 80-hour weeks while getting 20 hours of work done in them).

</comment><comment><USER10> The Laws of Productivity: <http://lunar.lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf>

<comment><USER11> I was gonna post the same link.

tl;dr you gain occasional productivity boosts by extending the work day, but that is inevitably followed by a decrease in productivity to make up for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In answer to the headline: Of course - just not every day. :)

In answer to the actual situation behind the headline: No. It's time to find a new boss.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd estimate that 4 hour programming days are feasible as an average.

10-11 hour days means that the guys will be just doing nothing (or worse) more than half of the time.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think Linus Trovalds in an interview was saying something of the sort:

I do not believe in crazy schedules. It does not worth it to work one day for 16 hours because the next day you will be like a ghost. Work as much that you will be able to work equally much and a lot the next day.

I do not think that it would be possible biologically to keep that pace of work(10-11 hours programming days) for long periods.

The exception: of course sometime when an emergency shows you should work and 10 and 15 and 18 hours straight

</comment><comment><USER15> Burn out will start after 2 weeks, error rate will raise accordingly. Very soon, you will be occupied a lot fixing errors that only occur, because programmers are not well concentrated.

Trivial. The company will lose instead of win. New features require programmers that are inventive. Ever seen someone inventive who is overworked?

And then: require 15 hours work without any more salary? Find new jobs.

After 30 years in programming business I must say: the way to win is to stay creative, think well what features your product needs to stay on top and satisfy customers. Implement and test this as good as you can. The rate buggy software loses customers is high. And a lost customer will not come back for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sure they are. I do it every day. I work at my actual job for 8 hours, and then come home and work on my own stuff for another 8 hours. I've been doing this for quite awhile. =/

<comment><USER15> So, life is a lot of fun for you?

<comment><USER17> How "fun" one's life is is not really for anyone else to judge, is it?

<comment><USER15> That's not a judgement, it's a question.

I'd be interested how this feels and how he does it. I manage to work on my projects for 3-4 hours a night, but not for extended times.

If someone here claims he has a way, let's ask him how.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Consider this a gift. It's a thinly veiled advanced-warning pink slip.

</comment><comment><USER19> If an employer ever asked you to do that, get out. Even if he takes "no" for an answer, your boss doesn't understand programming and how to allow programmers to function at maximum productivity, and _hasn't bothered to figure that out before he started hiring programmers_.

That is the wrong person to work for if you're a programmer, and it will be a reoccurring them.

</comment><comment><USER20> "For some reason our job listing that says 'engineers needed, 10-11 hour days for 8-hour pay' isn't getting the response we'd hoped for."

<comment><USER21> Maybe you should have had it say "software developers."

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The problem is it's hard to be creative or insightful if you are working that hard * , which means that you won't see the simpler way that saves a lot of time. So you can do it, but only for mindless repetitive mechanical work, that doesn't require creativity - but then again, that's exactly the kind of work that is ripe for automating, though doing so usually takes some insight and creativity.

This is not what you're talking about, but an exception is someone I knew who would code 30 hours straight, because it enabled him to keep all the code in mind, instead of having to reload it each day. I think it took a few days break after each such session.

* irrelevant to the question, but if "programming" includes thinking about it in the back of your mind, while day dreaming, asleep, having a shower etc, then you can "program" 24/7.

</comment><comment><USER21> Apart from the (admittedly pretty pivotal for this case) unpaid overtime request part, I feel a 10 hour average is not unreasonable as long as it's not rigidly mandated. Requiring physically being in the office for 10 hours straight five days a week is idiotic in software. Allow going home or stepping out of the office for a couple of hours for a walk in the park when the code isn't flowing or you're stuck on a dumb bug, but make it clear there's a lot of work to be done (and compensate accordingly!). If programmers like what they're doing they won't count the hours.

Of course that's not going to fly with those who don't wish to work outside standard 9 to 5 -- and there's a lot of people who don't for very valid reasons -- but they're less likely to be found in a start-up anyway.

<comment><USER23> the number of people who can effectively code for 10 hours a day for a period of months is... small. Nearly everyone I know who claims this ability spends a lot of time doing things like reading hacker news rather than coding.

This, I think, is one of the tests of a manager. A bad manager loves to see people looking busy. A bad manager will hire people who claim to work 10 hours (or more!) a day. This manager will quite often stay at work with everyone else (it doesn't matter how early you show up, as long as you show up before the boss. It doesn't matter how late you leave, as long as you leave after the boss.) but he usually slips into dealing with personal business. And so does nearly everyone else.

I think a much better approach is to let people figure out what their optimum productivity is. I know one guy who says "i have four good hours a day" - <USER2> he is very, very good during those four hours. But after those four hours, really, you might as well send him home to play video games or something. He's done.

Expecting 10 hours a day of work on average encourages a culture of deception; a culture of "look busy" which really, isn't any good for anyone. Yeah, I want you to work as much for me as you can. But really, if you are going to work for five hours a day and screw off on facebook the other five? I'd prefer you just go home and do something fulfilling. You aren't making me any money on facebook, and destroying your home lives doesn't make me any richer.

Now, there are some people who can code, consistently, for 10 hours a day. But they are dwarfed by the numbers of people who act busy for 10 hours a day to meet the expectations of management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Absolutely feasible, you'll just produce the same as of working 6 hours per day after the first couple of days of working so long. So absolutely useless too, if done for long time. Only useful for sprints, two or three days every month at max.

</comment><comment><USER25> Not really.

It would probably be better for the health of the company to direct all dev efforts towards marketing the current software (at a sane pace).

      For example:
      setting up mailing lists
      ad words
      ads on craigslist
      SEO
      A/B testing
      heck, even getting the devs to pick up the phone
      and do some old fashion cold calling.

The closer devs are to the customer the more they will know about what customers want.

Working 11 hours is counter productive, as a coder you should focus on mental state. It's far better to be highly productive for 3-4 hours a day than unproductive for 11 hours. Being unproductive for 11 hours just leads to working 12 hours the next day as you fix the bugs you put in yesterday. All you're adding to the code base at that rate is bugs. Being tired and in a poor mental state will lead to having two eyes on the goal instead of two eyes on the path. Time in seat does not equal working (or profitable) code.

How does working longer lead to more profit?

How does working longer lead to working code?

Have customers asked for those new features?

Are the customers paying for the dev effort?

Software is a business with zero cost of reproduction, therefore its essential that a customer base is established on the minimal amount of code. One should not start writing code until there are enough customers to pay for the feature or a customer is willing to front the costs for the dev effort. It's not the dev's fault that management chose a set of features that is unprofitable. Rather than adding more unprofitable features you should focus on adding profitable features. Or focus on selling the features you have until it's profitable. If you can't sell the feature don't code it. Find out first by trying to sell it.

Spolsky says one thing about features, DHH says another, the important thing is not who says something but how relevant it is to the situation at hand. As a user of Fogbugz I can tell you that one of the things I really liked about it was it's simplicity. Fogbugz for me was way better than JIRA which has many more features.

<comment><USER26> Good tools combine powerful underlying systems with abstractions that bring the necessary complexity of the system into a realm that is manageable by users. When done well it can make a tool that took a tremendous amount of effort and which encompasses a great deal of complexity look effortless and simple. And more importantly be intuitive to use.

If you look at a tool like a hammer both Spolsky and DHH would likely say that it was a simple tool. But that simplicity underlies a lot of complexity. The simplest hammer, the sort that a parody of DHH's ideals would lead you to believe he would advocate building, would be a simple suitably sized and shaped rock. Modern hammers are built using centuries of experience and a great deal of research. A great deal of metallurgy has gone into refining the exact variety of materials used in the hammer head as well as in the manufacture of it (drop forging). And not just in ensuring it is of a certain quality, but in ensuring that it is precisely suitable for its intended tasks. A great deal of research and experience has gone into shaping the head and the handle, and in their construction. Ergonomics, durability, efficiency, cost, etc, all of these factors are carefully balanced in the end product. When you hold a hammer you don't need a manual, it's operation is obvious and intuitive. The best tools work that way. It takes a lot of effort to learn how to drive an automobile properly because it is a complex task, yet the fundamental interface is nevertheless (today) very straightforward and intuitive.

Take a moment to think about all of the various tools you use routinely, from silverware and pocket knives to automobiles and cameras. Are these tools simple or merely deceptively simple? How do these tools take control of the inevitable complexity underlying their operation? How do they bridge the complexity gap between the "user interface" abstraction and their fundamental operation? What characterizes better tools of each sort from lesser tools?

The same applies to software as well. The language we use in describing software and its use is today incredibly crude and barely suitable for the task, which leads to many debates where neither side is capable of fully articulating their meaning and people are left with half-ideas of what either is trying to get at.

I don't think Spolsky or DHH are necessarily arguing in opposite directions, I think they are trying to articulate the complex nature of something that is difficult to convey. Elegance is perhaps one aspect of it, but there is no single word that fully describes the concept that either is trying to get across, I think.

Edit: Another perfect example: I occasionally use an infrared thermometer in the kichen. It is supremely intuitive to use. It is vaguely gun shaped, fitting easily in the hand. It has a single button, a trigger, and an lcd screen that displays temperatue and units. Pressing the trigger once generates an instantaneous reading which is displayed on the screen for several seconds. Holding down the trigger generates a continuous reading, updating the display perhaps a few times every second or so. Releasing the trigger leaves the last reading displayed as above. When taking a reading a red laser marks the targetted spot. The battery compartment can be opened without tools but is designed such that the act of using it will prevent the compartment from being opened.

When you consider the complexity of such a device, how many various pieces have to be put to use (such as optics, sensors, processors and software to analyze the IR spectrum within a narrow beam and determine a temperature to high accuracy, not to mention all the supporting components like the laser pointer, display, body, power system etc.) it gives a greater appreciation for the incredible elegance of the tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In my experience, the length of the working day is usually a red herring. Over-engineering & over-complexity is usually the problem that slows the launch of a product. (as well as good old-fashioned bad planning, bad management and unrealistic expectations)

* Too little pressure and flexible deadlines lead to over-engineering and feature creep.

* Too much pressure and unrealistic deadlines leads to bug-ridden, throw-away spaghetti code.

* A realistic deadline with a small amount of pressure leads to better design decisions and just-engineered-enough code.

Combining over-complexity with long hours towards the end of a release is normally a recipe for disaster.

Projects that have too little pressure at the beginning are often the ones that end up with too much pressure towards the end as unfinished, superbly flexible, elegant code is shoe-horned into the one imperfect small use case it was built for (while twenty other features, that were pushed aside for it, languish unimplemented).

</comment><comment><USER28> Coming up to a deadline, sometimes these really help (code marathons) when used sparingly.

After working on a few deadline-centric projects (based around the college school year), We've certainly found this to be the case.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's feasible but it not productive, what you do in 11hours can be be done in 8. Unless you are very enthousiast about what you are doing there is no way you start don't loosing productivity after 8 hours being focused.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the key question here is this guy's relationship to his boss, which can't be determined from the brief amount of data provided. There's also the issue of whether more features make a difference, so this entire thread is a bike-shed-painting exercise.

Everybody is saying "no", and I'm the PM who usually tells his team to take more time off, but I'm also a contrarian, so for purposes of this comment I'll say "yes"

Here's the deal: work is somewhat arbitrary. Yes, there are those of us who are working on curing cancer, building the next space transport system, or curing world hunger. But most of us are doing something a lot more mundane, like getting some random project finished.

Given a situation like that, there are two types of thinking. Type 1 says that since none of it matters, you might as well look out after yourself: make sure you are well-cared for. Have plenty of time off. Do fun stuff to alleviate the boredom. Pick up a video game in the evenings to spend ten thousand hours playing it over the next year.

Type 2 says that since none of it matters, it's up to you to make it matter. Pick a goal, find something to push yourself to. Make it into a game. Do something, _anything_ , to keep making yourself learn. Life is about stress, and if you are not externally stressed you must learn to create your own internal stress if you are to grow and learn and do more cool stuff.

Neither one of these types of thinking is worth a hoot by themselves, but I'll only work with people who have type 2 thinking and have to force themselves back to type 1. I've found there are way too many type 1 folks who have long forgotten how to work as a type 2, and those are folks who are just filling up seats and waiting for the end of the day. Those are also the types of folks who sit around wondering if it's "feasible" to work 11-hour programming days. The rest of us are just doing it.

So yes, you can, but it should be something special, and you need a system where you break off and do cool stuff. This is a long run, not a sprint, but even in a long run you need a kick -- a long sprint at the end. It's actually one of the better parts of a long run. Don't be a sucker for an abusive boss, but learning to push yourself and getting in the habit of applying internal stress is a critical factor in moving your life and career forward.

</comment><comment><USER31> Ten years ago, I worked at a startup with a fixed 50 hour week without getting burnt out or surfing the web but I don't think I could be as productive as I am now (45 hour week).

</comment><comment><USER32> In my opinion, not in a sustainable way.

I have worked 60-80 hour weeks for a period of a little over three months, but after that I needed some serious break time.

</comment><comment><USER33> Terrible idea Just to do it for the sheer fact of thinking more features will being in more money.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not consistently.

<comment><USER35> Exactly -- feasible, yes. Sustainable, no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Yes. But only for a short period of time.</comment>


Walt Disney Animation Studios Datasets - <AUTHOR> https://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/datasets <comment><USER2> Some context: During a panel on production renderers at SIGGRAPH [0] it was mentioned that most rendering research was not really usable for production rendering, as those algorithms are unable to handle the complexity of production scenes. Matt Pharr (one of the authors of pbrt [1]) asked the panelists to release production datasets for research purposes. Walt Disney Animation Studios is now following up on his request by releasing these two datasets. Yining Karl Li of Disney [2] and the readme for the Moana dataset [3] have some more info.

It's absolutely amazing that Disney is doing this, especially as the license is quite permissive and also allows the usage for non-research purposes.

[0] [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2927384](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2927384)

[1] [http://pbrt.org/](http://pbrt.org/)

[2] [https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2018/07/disney-animation- datas...](https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2018/07/disney-animation- datasets.html)

[3] [https://s3-us- west-1.amazonaws.com/assets.disneyanimation.co...](https://s3-us- west-1.amazonaws.com/assets.disneyanimation.com/island-README.pdf)

<comment><USER3> As an amusing aside, Brent and Rasmus got us a scene from "Meet the Robinsons" back in late 2006 that led to our first real on-the-fly subdivision work. Working with Brent and Dylan at Disney, it ultimately led me to support correct subdivision in Arnold.

At Stanford, this fed into our micropolygon/subdivision work, though we couldn't use the Disney scenes as that was only for me, Dylan and Utah. Luckily, Marcos at Solid Angle put me in touch with the folks from Zinkia Entertainment, which was _much_ more challenging than anything we would have created by hand. But we couldn't share that with anyone else either.

That this dataset is actually publicly available may easily push forward the subdivision/rendering community. Modern subdivision research folks (Loop, Niessner, etc.) have blazed past traditional evaluation with some amazing approximation work, including sharpness. Production renderers still don't those except for previewing though, because it's not that big of a win and because researchers haven't had access to scenes like this.

I'm super excited to see this scene (or portions thereof) replace Big Guy :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi! Karl Li from Disney Animation here; I can try to answer any questions about the dataset that folks may have.

<comment><USER5> How big is the films asset library in total? AKA How big is Moana's total dataset before render?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this is just crazy.

> The raw data necessary to render just one frame is available in the "Base" > package. [45 GB download / 93 GB unpacked]

<comment><USER7> Wow! I wonder how much memory these scenes take after building all of the required acceleration structures, etc.

Do Hyperion and Renderman support out of core renders?

<comment><USER8> I don't know about explicit out of core geomerty for path tracing in Renderman (completely different from the old REYES renderer which is now completely gone). But view dependent tesselation helps a lot with that (I suspect, but have not yet verified that the island was tesselated uniformly when they exported it out of their pipeline). Textures, which can easily be the biggest contributor to data usage, can be handled out of core using texture caches. These work well when two things are done right: tracing camera rays in blocks for coherent access to the textures and proper use of mip mapping and ray dofferentials for far away surfaces to allow safe access to minified prefiltered texture images. Somewhat counter-intuitively, This also improve overall image quality by bounding the frequency spectrum of the textures, requiring less samples to get an accurate representation.

Per Christensen said in his EGSR keynote last week that typical renders at Pixar use between 35 and 120GB of RAM and sometimes can load in about a TB of data. I don't know how to break this down into acceleration structures, geometry, textures etc.

<comment><USER2> RenderMan traces ray streams of a few thousands rays (at least not millions like Disney's Hyperion), right? Does that really help that much with reducing the shading costs? It probably makes a large difference for shading the initial hit point, but nowadays it's not uncommon to trace paths of more than 10 bounces. It seems very unlikely to me that it gives a significant speed-up with that level of incoherence and the high complexity of production scenes.

<comment><USER8> According to Per, the primary rays are traced per block, giving coherent accesses to the high resolution textures. Secondsry rays, especially with higher orders of reflections, are accessing higher mip map levels where it is safe, and as I understand it, these mostly fit into memory by virtue of being filtered down.

However, I don't think they actually do 10 bounces of diffuse reflections just yet. But this is just a guess. I simply doubt that it makes enough of a difference to bother with that.

<comment><USER9> I sit next to Per at work. :-)

Blocks of primary rays tend to be about 16x16 by default, though this is tunable. MIP maps do greatly help with textures for incoherent rays. But we are also able to use the same trick for geometry; secondary rays may use coarser tesselations than primary rays. Per wrote about this some time ago, but it's something we still leverage. [0]

The number of bounces we do is fairly flexible. [1] We actually default to an upper limit of 10 total rays per path, with an initial limit of 1 diffuse bounce and 2 specular bounces. Depending on the geometry that's hit these initial limits may get extended until the total hits the upper limit. There are cases where the higher limits make a noticeable difference to the look.

[0] [https://graphics.pixar.com/library/RayTracingCars/paper.pdf](https://graphics.pixar.com/library/RayTracingCars/paper.pdf), section 5.3

[1] [https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/display/REN/Trace+Depth](https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/display/REN/Trace+Depth)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> More info on Disney's 55K core cloud renderfarm from AWS re:Invent 2015:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btGphZQZqkY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btGphZQZqkY)

And thanks! This is great stuff ;)

<comment><USER11> Given one of the sample datasets was a cloud, I was hoping it was a talk on rendering clouds :-(</comment></comment>


Immigration Issues for a Canadian working for Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://blog.garyroumanis.com/immigration-issues

<comment><USER2> Degrees granted to me in the US: B.A., M.Eng, and soon, Ph.D.

Estimated cost of educating me paid for in entirety by American individuals (Private+Government): $600,000.

Chances of me getting to stay in the US:

Scenario 1: I get a tenure track job at an R-1 University, and I am exempt from the H1-B cap. The subsequent waiting time for my green card application is not long as I will be able to apply under the EB-1 track. Probability: Low to very low. The academic market is a crapshoot, and I need to churn out some serious publications over the next 3-4 years.

Scenario 2: I get employed at a Google/Microsoft class firm and they sponsor an H1-B. I wait the estimated 5 years for an EB-2 green card application to go through. Probability: very low to almost nil, as I don't want to be locked in for 5 years in such a job unless I get a researcher position (i.e. at MSR).

Scenario 3: I start a company. So I have a runway of about 29 months (which is how long the US allows a graduate to stay and work under OPT rules) to either make millions of dollars and reapply under O-1/H1-B. Otherwise, I am definitely out of the country as there is no way for me to stay in the US. Probability of success: low to very low.

Scenario 4: I marry an American girl and get a Green Card as a spouse of a citizen. Probability: low. I won't compromise my current/future relationships and/or hasten my life goals in order to stay in this country. Not when Canada is such an attractive option (with my degrees and partial French speaking ability I earn enough points under their system to get permanent residency on arrival).

Political status of this bullshit: [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/why- cong...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/why-congress- might-kill-the-most-obvious-policy-idea-in-america/262630/)

Return on investment for American interests: Likely zero.

<comment><USER3> Your probability for Scenario 2 is very low to almost nil. Why is that. You are aiming for R-1 university but you are not confident of getting into MSR etc? And you can still switch jobs while your Green Card application is pending. I think it's called AC21 though I am not exactly sure on the exact terminology.

On a side note, H1-B is cap exempt for ALL educational institutes and non- profit organizations.

<comment><USER4> You cannot switch jobs and keep the same Green Card application. It's true you can transfer an H-1B between employers but any associated Green Card application is lost if you leave them.

<comment><USER5> This is only true during the labor certification or PERM part of the green card application. There are typically three phases to an employment-based green card app:

1\. Labor certification/PERM (proof there is a need by the company) 2\. I-140 application (proof you fill that need) 3\. I-485 (formal application to receive PR)

It's been a few years since I went through the process, but basically, as soon as you've completed step 1, you can apply for steps 2 and 3. Once you've applied for 2 and 3, you receive an EAD card (work authorization).

It's always a little dicey to switch jobs with just the EAD because employment-based greens card require that you _intended_ to work for the employer who sponsored you. If you leave right after getting the EAD, your application may be denied because they don't believe you ever intended to work for your sponsor.

This is actually a pretty sweet position to be in because the company that hires you only has to keep applying for an EAD card for you. Pretty simple and not a lot of money.

Typically, if you wait 6 months or so after sending in the I-140/I-485, you can switch companies (through AC21). However, you need to find another job that is substantially similar to the one that was the basis of your green card application, you can't just take any job you want.

<comment><USER4> I've never heard of this before, from either my lawyer or any of the lawyers for any of the firms I've worked for. And I have asked this question specifically, because in my case, it may take much longer than normal to get a Green Card. But I'll investigate.

<comment><USER5> I did a quick google search and it appears that in order to switch jobs you need to have your I-140 approved, so I did misspeak on that point.

However, since the labor certification part (PERM) is a much quicker process and you can file for your I-140 and I-485 concurrently, it's not unreasonable to assume that from the date you first start the process, you'll likely to be able to switch jobs after 2 years or so.

This is actually really important for those poor souls from India and China who have priority dates that still in the 90s and won't likely get the physical green card for at least 5 years if not longer.

One thing to keep in mind is that lawyers often disagree as to how to interpret the USCIS regulations. I've had lawyers say "Jesus! Don't even leave the country!" and others say "Yeah, it's fine to switch jobs, no problem." It just depends on how risk adverse they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't get me started on immigration issues.

2004 - I applied to do my Master's in the United States, I had great financial aid in a good school and great GRE scores.

Student Visa? Neither approved nor Denied : Placed in indefinite limbo because I have a muslim name which brought up some flag in their database. Btw. my surname is the 'John Smith' of muslim names.

I gave up and went to Canada to pursue my education at McGill. Fantastic experience. Eventually landed a job in US and got my H1B this time. Thought the visa issues were behind me. I was wrong.

2007 - My mom applied for a US visa to come visit me. Neither approved/nor denied (Section 221(g) - name check).

2008 - My dad and mom both applied for a US visa to come visit me. Neither approved/nor denied - same reason.

2011 - After living in working in US for about 5 years and having gotten multiple visa stamps, I got to Vancouver to get my visa renewed. Placed under limbo again! Stayed in Vancouver for weeks before they 'cleared me'.

2012 - My mom applies again. Result? you guessed the answer. Visa limbo.

I'm facing another visa renewal soon and I'm prepared for another night-marish episode.

Oh yeah, forget about green card - the queue for my country has ensured that I'll be lucky to get it in this lifetime, pretty much screwing up my ability to take chances with starting my own start-up in the US.

The thing is that I really like living in this country, the work opportunities and its people. But the more I deal with the immigration system, the more un- welcomed and temporary I feel here.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement was negotiated between 1985 and late 1987, and was signed in January 1988.

The language of the treaty hasn't been meaningfully adjusted in over 25-years.

Therefore when you are going through the process, you should relate what you'll be doing in mid-1980's terms, especially during questioning.

For example, something computer systems analysts supposedly do in the 1980's is draw flow charts. Call it that, because modern variants of that won't be on the checklist.

The border agents, who are all regular and normal people, seek what's specifically described in the treaty. So wise-up, and be prepared to hit the correct notes. Everything invented since 1987 isn't part of being a computer systems analyst under the treaty.

The border agents know this, and interpret the treaty to some degree under current circumstances. But forget about showing the border agent how much you know. You need to relate to what they know: the treaty, as written.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. I tried my best to hit those bullet points but unfortunately failed.

<comment><USER8> Why did you continue to go to the same border crossing?

<comment><USER9> Using different border crossings is seen as a red flag by the agents.

<comment><AUTHOR> This.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Had a similar experience. I came from Toronto and I am working in the states right now. I was hired as a computer engineer. I got rejected the first time for my TN visa simply because the officer asked me, does your job involve writing code? And I answered yes. Then he proceeds, so you are basically a programmer. We don't allow programmers into our country. He wouldn't listen to my explanation and further claim that I was not qualified and I was only hired because I was cheap. (which is not true, I am well compensated)

Then the second time around, I had to lie and claim that I do zero programming for my job, and only "design" and "engineer" stuff. Lol....

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read countless stories similar to yours. It all seems like verbiage to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really feel your pain. For a lot of people reading this article, its not going to make a whole lot of sense. They are just going to think that you don't really deserve to be here no matter how much good you contribute to this earth.

I really can't stand this of ignorance!

Without going into a personal rant about this whole thing, I really want to find out if you are already "here" in the US?

If you are NOT here yet, I am going to give you fair warning NOTHING is garunteed until you are across the border!

I don't care if you have an approved H-1B visa! This means nothing. The border patrol agent has the FINAL say and can deny your entry into the US for ANY REASON AT ALL! I repeat! You can be denied ENTRY with an APPROVED H-1B!!

Make sure you have all your facts straight when you are going to cross! Your denial of entry is a HUGE problem. that is going to throw up RED flags like no other when trying to cross the border so please make sure you work closely with your lawyers here!

I really hope that all works out well for you and good luck! If you are already in the country and are just waiting to work! I'm really happy that you made it past all those bastard border patrol agents!

<comment><USER12> Yeah this really irks me, not just about the US but immigration in most 1st world countries is a pain in the butt.

"a million people naturalize every year, so it can't be that hard" - I'll bet none of the people that say that has first hand experience in immigrating.

It is an infuriatingly opaque and arbitrary process & there is often very little you can do about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sorry to hear this. As a Canadian in the US on an H1B, I've stopped visiting Canada :( This really sucks because I can't visit friends/family easily any more. The last foreign trip I had (was a quick visit to Europe for a conference), the border agent went through every single page of my documentation pack and asked me questions (intention of the questions seemed designed to trip me up on minor details). I hope the situation gets better one of these days :( :(

<comment><USER14> Your situation sounds extremely bizarre. There should be no reason to avoid traveling outside the US if you're a Canadian on an H-1B. Except maybe if it's about to expire and you have an application for an extension pending. (My employer's immigration team suggested I not travel under such circumstances.)

FWIW, I've travelled in outside of the US around 20-30 times on TN/H-1B status and never encountered problems. On most of these trips I've re-entered at YYZ (Toronto), and most of the time the border agent doesn't ask me any questions at all. Occasionally they ask me what I do, who I work for, or where I live. One time I was asked about what type of software I write and possibly what my salary was. I've never been asked for any more details than that.

I guess it's possible I just get an easier time than you because of profiling: white, male, well-known employer, typical Canadian/US accent, no trips to strange countries, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _"Although I am Canadian I spent my middle school and high school years in > Raleigh, NC"_

> _"After I graduated from McGill in June"_

Curious, did you pay out-of-country tuition rates to attend school here? I hope so, considering you didn't live, nor plan to work here.

Keeping in mind that all I have to go on is this little tale, I ask because it seems like you (and your family) have done a lot of walking through the grey area of immigration, skirting rules to take advantage of what both countries offer their citizens. Apparently it caught up to you.

Edit: For the downvoters: I'm Canadian. I don't appreciate that someone who essentially grew up in the US came back here to take advantage of our federal and provincial tax-dollar _subsidized_ resident tuition, only to turn around and leave the country for the US again the instant he graduated. Had he never left the US for school, would this have happened?

<comment><USER16> I don't understand why people are down voting this comment. It seems like the OP is a "citizen of convenience" like those in Lebanon who only wanted to make use of their Canadian citizenship when war broke out despite the fact that some of them hadn't been back to Canada in 5+ years.

Not that this really has a place in the main discussion, although it does involve citizenship in a different way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand your point of view. I didn't return to Canada for convenience though. I returned because McGill is phenomenal school. Moreover, I knew I would need to do internships during university. This would not be possible while under my mother's TN visa.

<comment><USER16> I appreciate your story, but it's very frustrating when people like you take away spots in tax payer funded universities from REAL Canadians who plan on staying and working to make this country a better place.

I hope the laws get changed to avoid loopholes like this in the future.

<comment><USER17> Do things become more real if you say real in capital letters?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If my memory is correct, the immigration team at my company recommended that I cross the border at an airport. Apparently these kind of problems may occur more often at land crossings. One might speculate it's because airports process a much higher volume and are therefore more used to this sort of thing, but I don't know if that's true.

Another thing my employer's immigration team definitely warned when I did apply for an H-1B was to be careful about traveling while the application was pending. The TN visa requires non immigrant intent, and they were concerned that a border agent might interpret an open application for H-1B as intent to immigrate. They strongly recommended that if I did travel that I not volunteer the fact that I have an H-1B pending. It's interesting that MSFT started your H-1B case before you were in the US, and I wonder if that had any effect.

</comment><comment><USER4> According to the lawyers I have had, and my own personal experience, it is a bad idea to try to obtain a TN visa at a land crossing. Your chances of success are higher if you go through the airport.

<comment><USER18> I got 3 TN visas on Buffalo border , if your papers are decent there should be no issue and I was applying under Management Consultant category (arguably hardest type of TN to get) Why would you risk wasting your airplane ticket in case visa is denied ?

<comment><USER4> I think that's the point. It shows that you're the kind of guy that can do that (and/or the company you work for). They are trying to stop immigration scams with TN visas filed by dummy corporations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The distinction between capital and labor perpetuates and absurd protectionism and is a major obstacle to economic growth. Immigration is a free trade issue.

<comment><USER17> Is both a free trade and a human rights issue. The desire to migrate and live and work in different places around the world should need no greater justification than mere idle curiousity and I believe that the current approach to state borders does nothing but stoke xenophobia and mistrust around the world.

Also, I come from the UK, which has more UK citizens working abroad than foreign citizens working here, all while some sections of the press runs stories about how foreign workers are crowding people out of jobs. I keep trying to ask people who support banning all foreign labour, what they think will happen when everywhere else bans UK labour from their countries in return and all those UK expat workers, with their wealth of experience, come flooding back in greater numbers than the foreign workers that have just been kicked out, so leading to even greater unemployment, while at the same time guaranteeing that nobody would really want to trade with us anymore. These kind of conversations often end somewhat badly for some reason.

Perhaps it might be because I tend to also mention the view that it is a bit rich for the UK to be complaining too loudly about immigration considering how big the empire grew from us going around and rudely sticking flags in other people's stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Do not go through land crossings in Washington State. Just don't do it. Your friends were right.

</comment><comment><USER21> Of my graduating class, a large enough number were going to the United States, most of which got through without a hitch.

The only problems I've heard happened at the very crossing mentioned in this post -- Blaine, WA. I know that I'll make sure to never cross there to get a "Computer Systems Analyst" TN.

</comment><comment><USER22> The entire process is horribly broken.

While in theory one can switch jobs during the Green Card process, in practice it is a paperwork nightmare, with plenty of IFs and BUTS to slow you down.

It is compounded by the fact that it is not in the companies best interest to let the employee acquire a green card asap. The company lawyers are therefore never in a hurry, and may not go for the most expeditious process.

In addition, there is rampant fraud committed by H1/L1 sweat shops. And the checks created by the Govt to check fraud, place an un-necessary burden on the employee, as opposed to the Govt agencies and employers.

</comment><comment><USER23> One tip to make life easier after obtaining a visa to work in the US : Apply for Nexus as soon as you can.

</comment><comment><USER24> That's rough. I know a couple Canadians who went through a similar process (also for Microsoft) and had no problems. Shame to hear this guy had such a shitty experience.

</comment><comment><USER25> That seems like an awful lot of effort just to go work at Microsoft. Now maybe if it was Google, Apple or Facebook. Or one of those super-cool SV start-ups.

 _tongue planted firmly in cheek_</comment>