Antenna designer writes about the iPhone 4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/6/24/apple-iphone-4-antennas.html <comment><USER2> A comment at techcrunch is priceless

"It's not a design flaw. Steve is just trying to bring gentility and good manners to mobile phone usage. The correct way to hold an iPhone 4 is with the thumb and index finger on either side of the phone, while extending the pinky outward as if holding a fine china cup (the pinky will also act as a supplemental antenna). Once the user is holding the phone like a Regency dandy, he will naturally tend to behave like one, showing the world what a well-mannered chap he is. Pure genius. "

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of those articles that makes me love the web. In the midst of a wave of angst about iPhone4 reception, we get a high S/N article, bubbled up from a vast froth of noise on the topic.

It's like HN is my antenna for the internet.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but if you open another tab for Reddit in Safari and have your mouse pointer overlapping both tabs, your bandwidth goes down.

<comment><USER5> Really? I feel nauseous when I have a Reddit window open. Is that why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a somewhat reasonable account (notably by an iPhone owner), though I remain skeptical (i.e., not trusting either side).

I've had an iPhone 4 for two days now, and I have yet to be able to reproduce the problem; I even tried licking my finger and wrapping it around the bottom left corner, making sure to connect both antennas. I couldn't get it to drop even one bar.

This is not at all to say that it's not a real issue, but the sensationalism belies how little we know about it so far. Of course, people are going to delight in exploiting any chink in Apple's armor, especially today.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't trust the "bars" to indicate anything.

<comment><USER8> This. If we are going to have a discussion about this, I really, really hope to at least see some dBm numbers.

From a test right now, picking up my Blackberry 8100 (antenna along the bottom) in roughly the manner I would use to hold it to my ear, I lose about 10 to 15 dBm (from around -66 to -69 to around -79 to -81), which means the received signal power drops by around 10 to 30 times. I don't know if that's particularly good or bad; I've never had problems with dropped calls.

<comment><USER9> Are there apps available that show signal strength in real numbers (dBm) instead of "bars"?

<comment><USER10> Not sure about Blackberry, but on Android: Settings / About phone / Status / Signal strength

<comment><USER11> You can always call this number from your iPhone: _3001#12345#_

and put your phone in field test mode

([http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/iphone/iphone-field-test-mode- let...](http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/iphone/iphone-field-test-mode-lets-you-spy- on-the-att-network-277797.php))

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately this capability has been removed from iOS4: <http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=942533>. Just confirmed it on my iPhone 4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> FTA -

| So, naturally, the design evolved to meet requirements - and _efficient transmission and reception while being held by a human hand are simply not design requirements!_

This is analogous to saying driving experience doesn't matter as long as car pases emission tests which is certainly not true (I hope). People don't buy phones because it passes FCC testing they buy phones to make calls! If you don't factor human hand into your design, word of mouth will kill the phone.

<comment><USER14> _word of mouth will kill the phone_

I'm not so sure. Of all the complaints about AT&T consistently dropping calls, people are still flocking to the iPhone. I realize they don't have a choice, but once again, people are voting with their dollars. They're willing to accept a subpar network for a cool phone.

<comment><USER15> people do have choice [http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph...](http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone)

people are voting with their dollars. The design of the product is more important than its functionality (this is to say: the average consumer likes pretty things).

<comment><USER14> By choices, I'm referring to the network. Most consumers (not ones who jailbreak, mind you...) don't have a choice. If they want the iPhone, they're stuck with ATT.

<comment><USER8> * in the U.S.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article by the same fellow is great stuff: [http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/5/30/30-db- in...](http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/5/30/30-db- in-30-minutes.html) .

<comment><USER17> If you enjoy Sherlock Holmes-type problem solving and forensic engineering, check out the user-contributed Sherlock Ohms series on Design News.

"Famous investigations into the most diabolical real-world cases in engineering."

<http://www.designnews.com/blog/Sherlock_Ohms/index.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've gotta say, this was both informative and amusing to read. I wish I got to read articles like this more often.

</comment><comment><USER19> My bet is once the author actually can get a physical handset in his hands he might change his view somewhat. I don't think the author is aware of the extent of signal loss. While Apple's statement is true that any handset will experience signal loss from being held tightly, the loss with some IPhone 4s is almost total loss. The comment by Jobs "just don't hold it that way" is probably going to tick a bunch of folks off. I still love the phone tho.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a perfect example of the effects of "optimization by proxy" that was discussed in the lesswrong article posted here yesterday.

The examples are really countless, auto crash tests and insurance safety ratings is a pretty good one, whereby "safety" has come to mean "safety to the occupants without any consideration of the risks to others".

<comment><USER21> Actually, the European crash safety tester does include pedestrian safety in its ratings: [http://www.euroncap.com/Content-Web- Page/6019e175-a493-4cce-...](http://www.euroncap.com/Content-Web- Page/6019e175-a493-4cce-bb94-df5bee4656bb/pedestrian-protection.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if increasing the gap between the metal antennae pieces would make any difference (i.e. the distance any signal would have to travel through your hand is increased, hence greater impedance).

</comment><comment><USER23> I've always wondered about the design flaw of keeping the buttons on the phone below the screen, making it next to impossible to hold the phone with one hand and use the thumb to press the buttons. If you flipped it upside down it was easy to use the thumb though. (actually I still have a button phone, but I figure that everyone reading this thread will have a more modern type of phone..)

<comment><USER24> You mean the volume buttons? Just be left handed and all is well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Putting this iPhone 4 in your pocket will likely couple more energy into your body (you bag of salt water, you) than did the first generation model. Yep, I predict it will be worse."

I hope this isn't dangerous to your health.

He is buying one, so I assume not.

<comment><USER26> "While certain media outlets continue to claim that regular cell phone use is unlikely to cause brain cancer, you should know that Interphone found "heavy users" of cell phones were found to have an approximately doubled risk of glioma, a life threatening and often-fatal brain tumor, after 10 years of cell phone use.

What was the definition of a heavy user?

About two hours … a month!

When this study was conducted (1999-2004), cell phone use had not yet exploded to the extent it has today. Now, the results are clearly outdated, because in the decade that's passed since the study was begun, cell phone use has grown exponentially and it is not at all unusual for people to use a cell phone for two hours or more a day!

What this means is that if you use your cell phone for two hours a month or more, you may be doubling your risk of a potentially fatal brain tumor. Use your cell phone significantly more than that, and your risk is likely much, much higher."

[http://emf.mercola.com/sites/emf/archive/2010/06/10/how- the-...](http://emf.mercola.com/sites/emf/archive/2010/06/10/how-the-telecom- industry-deceives-you-about-brain-cancer-risk-and-cell-phones.aspx)

<comment><USER27> As you seem to be well informed about the topic: Do you know if it is usual for cellphone designers to use the optional headset/headphone combination as an extended antenna and if so if it is still better to prefer it to a bluetooth based solution? I think this is something a lot of people would like to know as heavy cellphone use ia often unavoidable these days.

<comment><USER28> Almost all phone manufacturers use headset cable as FM antenna. On the other hand there is almost no way how it could be used as antenna for anything other than FM. (antennas for GSM/GPS/WiFi/whatever bands are carefully designed devices with tight tolerances and not pieces of wire of some approximate length)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "And sometimes an antenna that's not great, but good enough, is good enough."

Clearly his carrier isn't AT&T.

<comment><USER30> Normally funny, I suppose, if a bit tired. _But this man designs antennae for use on AT &T's network_</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Release software as open source? - <AUTHOR> I've been working on this cloud hosting software (basically a DigitalOcean clone) for quite some months/years on the side now and I finally am finishing everything up to release the software the next few days/weeks.
I think there is a sweet-spot for people where OpenStack is too "big" and they simply want to spawn VMs on demand like with DO/Linode/Vultr but on their own servers. This is where my software shines.
The software could also be used by hosting providers that are currently using legacy software solutions like SolusVM.
Since I put so much love (and of course time) into this software I have a hard time simply releasing it as open source. That would mean that everyone can use my software to earn money, without me seeing anything from that. I see the pros of open source, but somehow the cons are currently more prevalent.
This is why I am thinking about selling licenses for the software, which are based on how much servers are managed by my software. This way people who only use it privately with one server would pay nearly nothing while big providers will pay a fair amount for the foundation of their business (aka my software).
I am just torn between to open source it or not, I simply see it as a lot of money lost, more hassle to manage everything but on the other hand the project could grow much faster and with enterprise support, etc. there is also money on the table. I also thought about the GitLab way of releasing a CE edition as open core while having an enterprise edition, but this is so much work, that I currently don't have the time for as a one man dev.
I also fear that when releasing it open source, there is basically no way back.
Does anyone of you have experience with this? I would love to hear stories on which way you guys went with and if you regret it or how it worked out generally.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Random remarks:

* You have no moral obligation to release something as open source.

* Open sourcing a project is not free. It's work. You have to manage maintenance/releases/contributions/etc, in a way that will match your audience's expectation (much more than for a closed source app). If you fail to do so someone will fork it and de facto take over your project. In general, do not open source your project if you're not ready to put in the extra work.

* Typically when you open-source you don't sell licenses, you sell support contracts. If it's cheaper for enterprise customers to pay for maintenance than to update the software by themselves, they'll pay. If your software requires your expertise (i.e. it's complex and/or specialized enough) this might be a valid option.

* If you're still on the fence, consider releasing a 'lite/free' edition, i.e. closed source with some hard limits, so that individuals and small teams can use it at no cost, and then see where it goes regarding that particular edition.

<comment><USER3> I agree, but I'd like to add some questions for the OP:

 _Why_ do you want to open source it?

Are the alternatives open-sourced?

Do you want to start a small company that sells the license and support of the software?

Are you still studding or you have a full time job?

There are millions of open source licenses. It's not easy to pick one.

My inaccurate small list: Something like BSD/MIT allows anyone to use/change/sell your software. Apache is quite similar, but it has a patent disclaimer. With GLP if someone redistribute a modified version of your code then it must also be with a GPL license, it is more or less free, depending of your definition of freedom. For a server side program perhaps AGPL is better, because if someone makes a modification of your program in their own server then they must publish/contribute it. Don't take my word. You must do some research and get a serious accurate description of each license and choose the one you prefer.

Just don't make up your own license or use a silly license like WTFPL. If someone wants to use your software, the lawyers in the company will be happier to see a usual license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is the documentation ready?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, website and docs are ready to get started. Just working on the latest details.</comment></comment>


Dennis Cooper fears censorship as Google erases blog without warning - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/14/dennis-cooper-google-censorship-dc-blog <comment><USER3> Large discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757)

More discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063)

Another comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097707)

Yet another comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12089980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12089980)

Another submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12088543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12088543)

And another: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12100781](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12100781)

 _Added in edit: As of 15:00 BST, 14:00 Zulu, all three major discussions (including this one) are still active and seeing contributions. If you want to know what people are saying, rather than just your own "fire and forget" comments, you'll need to visit all three submissions."_

<comment> D-Coder The last link (12100781) is to an unrelated article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't help but repeat: See whatever you have in the public cloud as _a cache copy_ of your information, a copy that can disappear at any moment, and you can't do anything about it. Have a local master copy of _everything_ you care about, properly backed up.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't help but feel like the word Censorship is being severely diluted by using it in cases like these.

<comment><USER6> Nah, It's been meaningless for a while now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this a common thing? I can't imagine writing a book stores entirely on blogspot. UI aside, most of the writers I know are at least somewhat cognizant of the need for backups.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is why IndieWebCamp came up with POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere ([https://indieweb.org/POSSE](https://indieweb.org/POSSE)). By all means, use Blogger, Facebook, G+, Flickr, Medium, Nautilus and any other outlets you care to, but remember that only you can be the caretaker of your own data.

</comment><comment><USER9> Question for @dang (or other mods) - this is now marked as a dupe and so won't appear on the front page, even though it got over 80 points and nearly 20 comments in just 40 minutes.

Does that mean the comments here will sink without trace and forever be ignored?

<comment><USER10> Feature request: merge

<comment><USER9> I've been asking for a merge feature for years. This is now a great example of just how bad the situation can get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Art is supposed to be challenging but if you think about it even porn hosts do censorship. We live under a privitized tyranny of terms and conditions with no due process.

<comment><USER12> That's not a fair statement, and isn't any different than it's ever been.

There's never been an obligation for other people to support and help distribute obscure and controversial "art".

In fact, it's easier to get it distributed today than ever before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How long before other companies (like Medium) will start doing this?

That's why I'm advocating hosting your own blog. Github Pages basically provide free hosting for static pages, and you can use a blog generator like Pelican or Jekyll. Sure it's a hassle to set-up for the average person but the peace of mind might be worth it.

<comment><USER14> If you use github pages, you aren't hosting your own blog.... GitHub is.

<comment><USER15> Sure, but you are more likely to keep your local clone up to date and it is easier if the need comes up to migrate to any other static file host or jekyll build host that accepts a git repository push. Backing up and restoring most traditional CMS is much more onerous that git pull/push.

<comment><USER10> Right! And GP, jekyll can run on other hosts, not just Github.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So in effect Google lulled him into believing that they were okay with is work and it was secure.

<comment><USER17> Seems so yes, and apparently,

"His advice to other artists who work predominantly online is to maintain your own domain and back everything up."

He never received same advice from others in the last 14 years, bit odd..

Reads to me as a case of (the dutch saying), who burns his buttocks has* to sit on the blisters

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> We have not enough tech education

"impossible for culture to be produced."

It's rather cheap to setup or let someone setup your own wordpress server on a hosted server, made redundant with backups.

So it's worrying that artists think it's Google hosting or nothing.

</comment><comment><USER10> [moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757) ]

</comment><comment><USER19> I think all this really does is remind everyone that they should review their current backup strategies

</comment><comment><USER20> What the hell is he going to sue for? Google is a private company; they have the right to ban anyone for any reason.

It worries me that Dennis Cooper has no respect for Google's private property rights.

<comment><USER21> Private property rights are not an unlimited license to be a jerk - <USER2> libertarians do seem to think so.</comment></comment>


US Corporations Win Against Privacy in EU Parliament Consumer Committee - <AUTHOR> http://www.laquadrature.net/en/us-corporations-win-against-privacy-in-eu-parliament-consumer-committee

<comment><USER2> It's not the first time the US lobbyists have managed to get to a committee, that doesn't necessarily mean they will win the parliamentary vote. In fact, this could all be part of the game. Up until recently the EU parliament favored even stronger privacy protections.

The more worrying issue is they got to the EU council of ministers (i.e., representing the individual governments). The current Irish presidency seems to be completely bought and paid for by the US, they really don't give a flying fuck about the rights of EU citizens, and have put the council on a direct collision course with the parliament.

Personally, I find it utterly disgusting that US companies and the US government are lobbying EU politicians to surrender their voters' civil rights.

<comment><USER3> The US companies are disgusting, but it's a far cry from the wretchedness of the legislators that are proposing the laws whispered in their ears.

<comment><USER4> I think the US Government is lobbying against it, too (and of course Facebook):

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/18/us-government-still- leaning...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/18/us-government-still-leaning-on- europe-to-dilute-data-protection-reform-proposals/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate a lot of the pressure for lax standards on data breech notifications. I do have questions about whether the pressure on privacy laws is about reasonable things (e.x. Don't be like California -- or at least don't prosecute the internet based on laws from 1971 that should have been modified 4 times over by now) or not. I personally try and create reasonable data rules based heavily on user opt-in and sensible standards that allow users to retrieve relevant information. Ideally we could get something resembling a world standard here that countries agreed to comply to as a high-bar so that companies could set-up a best practice for user data that would be usable worldwide. I think most of my problems with user privacy laws are not relating to quality of privacy but rather fragmentation across nations/regions/markets. I want a strong standard here as both a user and a creator, but I also want one that doesn't slow the spread of good technologies across the globe.

</comment><comment><USER6> What the flying fuck do US companies have to say in a EU committee?

</comment><comment><USER7> I consider ending the illusion that people are perfect a much better idea than a "right to be forgotten".</comment>


OpenKB: Markdown Knowledge Base (FAQ) Application in NodeJS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mrvautin/openKB <comment><USER2> Thanks for the love. I hope people get some use out of it.</comment>


The Neuroscience of Drumming - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-neuroscience-of-drumming.html <comment><USER2> As a drummer for 15 years, including drumline at a competitive level, the head of a top university drumline, "drum cantain", and years of playing set in a band, I've observed a few things among different people.

For the people that are trying to learn, it became very noticeable, some people can naturally drum, and some people simply...just can't. The divide is quite large in fact. A natural drummer could pick something up in 5 mins, while someone who 'can't' would take weeks to pick the same thing up. Then of course any iteration of that new thing, the natural would almost immediately get it, and again....the other would take the same amount of time. It's really like how the brain is wired. (I'm not a neuroscientists)

Among people outside of the drumming world, you can notice people tapping all the time. At a concert of just to music playing. Some people I can tell right away, they would make a good drummer if they actually did it. They can stay in time to what they are listening too and it comes naturally. Others...well...rhythm just isn't going to happen for them.

Put 10 people in a room with music playing to a steady beat, say 128 bpm. Now ask them all to clap to that beat. 99% of the time it will rush. Try it out. If there is someone who is "natural" at it, that person, or several of them, will separate from the group, and you get the flam, or out of sync, clapping sound.

As for "smarter"... I don't know about that. I would say that many drummers I have known would easily be consider the best musicians in the band. Whether it be a rock band, jazz, or marching band.

<comment><USER3> You are substantially more accomplished than I am, but I do have one observation to add to this.

I think there are four elements to making a drummer:

1) Being able to keep time 2) Limb independence 3) Speed 4) Taste

For me, #2 was clearly the hardest. I found that it took lots of practice in order to achieve relatively decent independence. And even after all that practice, I find many other drummers are much better than me in that regard. I can't say it's ever held me back in terms of confidence because I play the types of music I want to play and can still say I'm better than many other drummers. I started out on snare drum and later moved on to the set and even though I had a strong foundation in rhythm, stick control, etc. it was still a lot of practice.

I'd be very curious to know what you think some people can pick up in five minutes. I've always been curious about how long it takes others to develop that muscle independence.

You can also hide some technical proficiency by playing tastefully. This works well in many genres of music, but certain genres require substantial amounts of technical ability.

<comment><USER2> I was more thinking along the lines of the mental side of drumming. Although, limb independence is all mental I guess...

Talking about picking up in 5 minutes, I meant more for rudimentary drumming. i.e. playing rudiments, or a certain combination of notes, different tempos, going from eight-notes, to triplets, to sixteenth-notes back to a triplet on beat 4, all in a measure. Stuff like that.

It applies to the set and limb independence as well. I never really thing about limb independence anymore. At a certain point, if you can "think it", you can play it. Thinking it means something different to a lot of people, but literally count out the notes, however you do it (1 e and a), and make sure you say the number of the downbeat on the downbeat. You'll get to the point where you see a rhythm, and without having practice what your arms and legs are doing, you can just play it on set. Now it takes a bit of practice to get to that level, as it involves an understanding of music, reading, comprehension, etc. Of course there are uncommon time signatures and stuff you may run into that are weird, but you would be playing some very uncommon music haha. I played with Steve Smith (of Journey) and he was thrown off by an ensemble we were doing, took him a few hours to get it, even with his experience. It was just something he had not see before.

Now stuff like that crazy blast metal or whatever it's called now is different...getting your feet to play sixteenth notes on the double bass at 200 bpm is (stupid) just muscle building...

<comment><USER3> I completely get what you're saying. I've achieved good enough independence with my arms and my right leg, but never really got there with my left leg. Outside of playing quarter or eighth notes over whatever else I'm doing, I never really got there with the rest of it. If I were to try and learn something more a more syncopated left leg pattern, like a lot of latin grooves have, it would take me a lot of practice before I felt comfortable with it. That's where I really began to struggle and start noticing shortcomings in my play. When I started working through Complete Modern Drum Set, which probably increased my proficiency on the set more than any other book, is when I really started to notice how much I struggled with it. A lot of that stuff wasn't that difficult to pick up -- the linear patterns, time signature changes, playing off the beat, etc. But through in some odd hi-hat work and I just fell apart.

I never really struggled with some of the other stuff you mention though. Rudiments, keeping time, understanding tempos, and how notes break down, etc. That stuff came relatively naturally. Once I understood notes break down into whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, etc., understanding things like triplets came very naturally.

Interesting story about Steve Smith. I remember seeing a video of Carter Beauford struggling through odd time signature changes as well. I'm sure unless you're immersed in things like progressive music on a regular basis, things outside of standard time signatures probably are a little foreign, especially to pop drummers like Smith and Beauford.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there; are they different because they drum, or do they drum because they're different? Same can be postulated about software developers; do they think different because they work with programming languages, or vice-versa?

<comment><USER5> Since there's a lot of drummers checking in on this one, I thought that I'd come in from the reverse side. Rhythm never made any sense to me. When we were supposed to clap to the beat of a song in music class, I usually just cheated off the kids next to me and tried to match my hands to their own. If that failed, I'd just clap every time the person in the song said a word. For children's music, that was usually close enough.

<comment><USER6> " _If that failed, I 'd just clap every time the person in the song said a word. For children's music, that was usually close enough._"

It's not just children's music. Most songs you find today, if you listen closely enough, the words _follow_ the beat. I.e. every once in a while, a word starts on the "one" beat.

And we take it for granted. You'll very quickly realize something is "off" if that's not the case. That's usually what you find in "artsy", "look at us we're weird and different" type of music. Annoying most times, and incredibly difficult to get right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Could you come up with a counter-example to the hypothesis that drummers are actually natural intellectuals?"

"Lars Ulrich"

"..."

</comment><comment><USER8> Jaco Pastorius started as a drummer and then moved to bass. In that crossover, he held tightly to his initial drumming bent and incorporated rhythm into his playing, frequently playing off the drummer to add complexity to the music's rhythms. He also used a sequencer to sample his bass as the rhythm track for his solos. I am guessing it would have been fascinating to image his brain and compare it to both drummers and non-drumming musicians:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3FAbGepa14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3FAbGepa14)

(kicks in sequencer at 4:10)

</comment><comment><USER9> Where's the science? (Didn't have time to watch the videos though)

</comment><comment><USER10> I take MOOCs as a hobby. HavardX's fundamentals or neural science [https://www.mcb80x.org/](https://www.mcb80x.org/) is probably the best produced MOOC I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER11> Drumming is almost as sublimely infectious as yawning - try tapping a little rhythm around others and see how regularly others start tapping themselves.

</comment><comment><USER12> As a bassist, I'm curious when neuroscientists will think about analyzing the brains of the rest of the rhythm section.

<comment><USER13> As a musician and drummer for many years... I am putting myself in the "natural rhythm" camp - I never struggled with keeping time, it came easily and I didn't have to work too hard. Now, actually learning to play a drum set, actually getting the limb separation down, took years and years of practice before I could feel really comfortable.

As far as the rest of the rhythm section -- it's the same for any member of the band. You either have it, or you don't. I played with several bass players who didn't have it, and I felt like as the drummer I was working twice as hard as playing with a bass player that did "have it". I knew a bass player who practiced for hours with a metronome, and he could never play an upbeat in the right place. That's something that comes at an intuitive level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I didn't see anything definitive in the article. Didn't go through the videos though. The takeaway seems to be if you can play music to the point of causing pain ('musician's high', may be), then your brain probably is different.

Isn't that true for any field, musical or non-musical?

</comment><comment><USER15> "... the work of Terry Bozzio (below) playing the largest drumkit you've ever seen."

Unless you've ever seen Neil Peart.

<comment><USER16> In it's largest incarnation, Terry Bozzio's drumkit absolutely dwarfed Peart's.

[http://i.imgur.com/W81F6XN.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/W81F6XN.jpg)

<comment><USER15> Agreed, but that's not the same set in the video the article refers to.</comment></comment></comment>


Up to 2B times acceleration of scientific simulations with deep neural search - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08055 <comment><USER2> I get more than a little annoyed with the advertising-like tone in this and several other articles around this general class of method/trick for speeding up complex simulations.

It's not that it's not a useful method (it is). It's that it misrepresents the utility of the general "build an exact simulation, then train a regressor on it to make fast approximations" approach. It's very useful in certain situations (repeated calculations on similar parameters) and completely useless in others.

The key issue is that most of the slow models you'd want to use this on are highly non-linear. In certain regions of the parameter space, very small changes in input result in very large changes in output. This is fine, so long as you know where all of these regions are and can capture them in your training data. That's easier for some problems than others. Even assuming you do know how/where to collect dense training data, this approach is only useful within the bounds of the training data you collect. It's relatively uncommon (but not super rare) that you want to repeatedly run a complex simulation within the same parameter space. This method is great when you do want/need to do that, and useless otherwise.

You have to understand that what you've trained is little more than a look up table. Anything that claims it can actually learn highly non-linear and irregular behavior well outside of the training dataset's bounds is snake oil.

Understand where this general class of technique is useful and where it isn't and ignore overblown claims. The entire abstract here is overblown hogwash. The actual paper is relatively interesting, but I really wish folks would drop the absurd advertising language and focus on what distinguishes this from the hundreds of very similar studies/methods on this topic.

<comment><USER2> Sorry for the rant... I just feel like abstracts are the most important part of a paper and get annoyed with poor ones. A better abstract would arguably be something they have a few paragraphs into their introduction:

"To construct high fidelity emulators with limited training data, the machine learning models need to have a good prior on the simulation models. Most work to date in building emulators using random forests, Gaussian Processes,or other machine learning models, do not fully capture the correlation among the output points,limiting their accuracy in emulating simulations with one, two, or three-dimensional output signals. On the other hand, convolutional neural network (CNN) have shown to have a good prior on natural signals, making them suitable for processing natural n-dimensional signals. However, as the CNN priors inherently rely on their architectures,8one has to find an architecture that gives the suitable prior of a given problem. Manually searching for the right architecture can take a significant amount of time and domain-specific expertise and often produces sub-optimal results.

Here we propose to solve this problem by employing efficient neural architecture search to simultaneously find the neural network architecture that is best suited for a given case and train it. With the efficient neural architecture search and a novel super-architecture presented in this work, the algorithm can find and train fast emulators for a wide range of applications while offering major improvements in terms of accuracy compared with other techniques, even when the training data is limited."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Basically what jofer said...

I work in a field of condensed matter simulation, and the claim seems bizarre, empty, meaningless. Basically it's not that original, or difficult, to train a linearly-scaling with system size machine learning model on an underlying physics simulation that scales very slowly.

Don't get me wrong, it's still very cool and satisfying to get reasonably accurate results on my laptop in a few seconds what would take hours, or days, on supercomputer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hopefully this only ever gets used for exploration, not verification.

<comment><USER5> Why not?

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

<comment><USER6> Could you explain the link you're making here? As far as I understand four colour theorem was computer assisted proof in the sense that mathematicians wrote a very specific and analytical definition for it in a logical theorem prover.

The linked article is very different right? Because it's using a neural net to do some kind of probabilistic inference as a heuristic for imperfectly stimulating physical events.

<comment><USER4> Exactly; it's about generating (much faster) heuristics for "guessing" the outcome given certain parameters, instead of running the real simulation every time. Useful, for sure, but the real thing should be used to verify once you've found something interesting.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UX Design: Drop-Downs in Forms - <AUTHOR> https://uxplanet.org/ux-design-drop-downs-in-forms-c6943ec30037#.t1d6fri8s <comment><USER2> I generally agree with the principles here and long drop downs are problematic.

But the author misses an important point; on most modern browsers you CAN start typing when you have a Dropdown open and it will jump you to the selection that matches what you're typing (if anything does), and I believe ALL browsers support at least jumping to the first letter.</comment>


The Top 3 JavaScript Mistakes You're Making Right Now (and How to Fix Them) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.devmastery.com/the-top-3-javascript-mistakes-you-re-making-right-now-and-how-to-fix-them-8512369e1e00#.fgdp0dwr3 <comment><USER2> Oh boy.</comment>


Show HN: A better way to pipe curl into sh - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kevlar1818/kolsch <comment><USER2> Hmm… Kölsch! Surely one of the better things to come from Cologne.

I always feel dirty executing shell scripts from the 'net (Node does this too, even if the script only adds the relevant repository for Debian/Ubuntu).

To be honest though, if executing a script is really the easiest way to get something done, I prefer verifying the GPG signature (if any) instead.</comment>


IOS 7 Might Be The Death of Apple - <AUTHOR> http://jada.ms/blog/ios-7

<comment><USER2> Article works now :)

I also noticed that you changed the theme from a svbtle one to a custom one - a welcome change, I dislike seeing the svbtle theme used on other blogs.

You make some valid points in the article, but not sure how you come to the conclusion that this is the death of Apple. An obvious hyperbole - but even so - if Apple have taken inspiration from competitors. That is not a kiss of death in itself. As long as they do things differently where it matters they will have a unique value prob for customers.

</comment><comment><USER2> I actually to read what you wrote but your site is down...

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be working now.

<comment><USER2> :( Not found.</comment></comment></comment>


V-Mail - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-mail <comment><USER2> I think this is awesome... I can't even imagine the overhead of unpacking and then "scanning" each of those letters by hand and yet, and this was still: higher bandwidth, lower latency, and a more secure transmission method.

Also a big reminder of just how far we've come as I sit here about to communicate with the entire world almost instantly.

Finally, it also reminds me of one of my favorite RFCs, "IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service": [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549)

<comment><USER3> >I can't even imagine the overhead of unpacking and then "scanning" each of those letters by hand

At this point in the war, all mail (not just those to service members) entering and exiting the United States were opened by hand and microfilmed for censorship and counter-espionage purposes by the Office of Censorship[0].

So technically the mail opening and scanning aren't extra overheads, since those same steps apply to regular snail mail as well.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If they printed the mail in the end anyway, that still required paper. I'm guessing they sourced the paper locally.

<comment><USER5> The paper could be sent in bulk from wherever it could be sourced from, including non belligerent countries, it also could be shipped in large rolls instead of harder to handle mail bags, it also reduced the need for inbound sorting too.</comment></comment>


Freelancers Weekly, a once a week newsletter for freelancers and consultants - <AUTHOR> http://freelancersweekly.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> First issue goes out in a few hours, and have 165 subscribers so far. Kudos to Peter Cooper and Alex Hillman for the inspiration.</comment>


Pro-Trump "I Love America" Facebook Page, Is Run by Ukrainians - <AUTHOR> https://popular.info/p/massive-i-love-america-facebook-page <comment><USER2> Facebook just deleted this page so I guess this report was onto something</comment>


Learning through ferroelectric domain dynamics in solid-state synapses - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14736 <comment><USER2> It appears that we might have jumped on the transistor metaphor too quick and to intensely. I believe not everything is binary in the brain, even if the resulting executive action is. Patterns, for example, might not be.

<comment><USER3> Who are "we"?

For example, "Almost everybody accepts that the brain does a tremendous amount of analog processing. The controversy lies in whether there is anything digital about it." [1]

[1]: [http://www.rle.mit.edu/acbs/pdfpublications/journal_papers/a...](http://www.rle.mit.edu/acbs/pdfpublications/journal_papers/analog_vs_digital.pdf) (page 30 of the PDF, labelled 1630)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Correct me if I'm dead wrong here, but isn't "software machine learning" taking advantage from all the neurons being "interconnected", similar to a brain? How does that work with physical (discrete?) components as in this case?

<comment><USER5> There's good reason to believe that different parts of the brain are quasi- specialized to particular applications. In a sense, this applies to particular software artificial neural networks (ANN) as well, particularly if the various hyper-parameters are fixed (number of neural units per layer, etc). One of the primary advantages of software ANNs over hardware ANNs (which don't really exist yet) would be the ability to easily change the hyper parameters.

Hardware implementations of ANNs, such as might be designed based on these FTJ-based artificial synapses, would have some fixed hyper parameters, and thus would be pseudo-specialized. This disadvantage could potentially be more than compensated for by a dramatic learning speedup and power-usage reduction. Transistors are highly scaled and low power, but it takes a lot of them and a lot of time to simulate each neural unit.

On a separate note, the best-performing software ANNs don't emulate spike time dependant plasticity, which is believed to be the primary learning mechanism of the human brain. Instead, they use variations of backpropagation and gradient descent, which is almost certainly not how the human brain learns. It remains to be fully understood how the two compare at various tasks. Most likely, they will have different strengths and weaknesses, making each useful in their own right.

<comment><USER6> It's far from clear that STDP is sufficient to the brain's learning mechanisms, though it is certainly necessary at some scales and stages.

The possibility space between relatively simple and insufficiently general unsupervise/clustering approaches and rigid SGD schemes is large, and probably contains the brain's true inference engine. Personally, I am excited by some of the ideas brought forward in this Bengio paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05179.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05179.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it remarkable that their simulations exhibit sparse encoding. Is this a know property of artificial neural networks based on spike-time dependant plasticity?

I can imagine how it might emerge in this particular implementation from the electric current following the path of least resistance through the circuit, thereby preventing adjacent neurons from reaching criticality. This mechanism never occured to me before reading this article, though. Is anyone aware of any prior art on this topic?

<comment><USER6> Check methods-- the simulations exhibit sparse coding because the model was built that way, in particular, it assumes LIF (leaky integrate and fire) output neurons that can inhibit each other. In fact, this assumed inhibition is the only reason it works as is. Else, many neurons would probably fire simultaneously in an unstructured crossbar without a set learning rule.

Nevertheless, a STDP type learning rule can inspire interesting applications. One of my co-advisors authored an article [1] which shows a completely unsupervised classification on the MNIST challenge in a crossbar environment, achieving 93 \% . Nothing like state of the art CNNs etc, but considering this was done without labels, that's pretty impressive.

[1][http://www.ief.u-psud.fr/~querlioz/PDF/Querlioz_PIEEE2015.pd...](http://www.ief.u-psud.fr/~querlioz/PDF/Querlioz_PIEEE2015.pdf)</comment></comment>


The only framework that makes responsive-email easy - <AUTHOR> https://mjml.io/ <comment><USER2> Yay for DSLs! Awesome :).</comment>


Mumtris - Tetris in M - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pkoper/mumtris Only for ancient hackers: Tetris in MUMPS, implementation is GT.M specific. <comment><USER2> To add insult to injury, it uses 100% CPU by design :)</comment>


Computational photography from selfies to black holes - <AUTHOR> https://vas3k.com/blog/computational_photography/ <comment><USER3> On the extreme end, if you live in the countryside you can replace GPS entirely using celestial navigation/star tracking. This is commonly used for rockets and satellites but right now if you own a truck or pickup you can easily go completely off-grid by mounting a lens on the rooftop. E.g. [http://nova.astrometry.net/](http://nova.astrometry.net/)

For implementing the system on an embedded device e.g. toy drone, raspberry pi etc., the main data structure you want is a k-d tree together with some sort of evergreen star chart (it doesn't have to be extremely evergreen, current astronomy libraries can easily predict orbits for a couple decades without significant skew/deviation unless you are are aiming for centimeter level geolocation accuracy).

For the hardware you can either use existing consumer-grade stuff followed by a ton of image processing with ML as suggested above or you can use a industrial grade tracker which easily exceeds 4 figures.

[https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-11-26-star-trackers-the- cutti...](https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-11-26-star-trackers-the-cutting-edge- celestial-navigation-products-available-on-the-global-space-marketplace)

It's a pretty fun weekend project. Here are some links to get started:

[https://github.com/mrhooray/kdtree-rs](https://github.com/mrhooray/kdtree-rs) [https://github.com/astronexus/HYG- Database/blob/master/READM...](https://github.com/astronexus/HYG- Database/blob/master/README.md)

Instead of jacking up your truck, add celestial nav to it. Nothing screams freedom and independence more than cutting dependency on state-funded satellite systems. Caveats: needs more signal processing during daytime, fallback to inertia navigation when it is cloudy.

<comment><USER4> Rockets and LEO satellites often use GPS these days because it's easier, but, I am impressed by this diy startracker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great article!

> In fact, that's how Live Photo implemented in iPhones, and HTC had it back > in 2013 under a strange name Zoe.

A reference to zoetropes, which were arguably one of the first "movies". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope)

> To solve the problem, Google announced a different approach to HDR in a > Nexus smartphone back to 2013. It was using time stacking.

I don't think time stacking is the appropriate term to use here, as standard HDR is also doing "time stacking", in that it takes multiple photos with different exposures across a small interval of time. Maybe "Fixed exposure fusion"?

I think there's a lot more to be done in computational photography, in research and engineering. In fusion of images from multiple cameras, we're barely scratching the surface. Exciting times ahead!

</comment><comment><USER6> I dropped my previous iPhone while cycling home from work and lived for a while with a busted lens. It made for some interesting photos, but was mostly annoying.

As a result I started using my DSLR again, and I rediscovered how beautiful the photos were. They also print nicer.

This fall I finally replaced the busted phone with an iPhone Pro. The camera on this thing is great, but the computational photography enhancements are particularly nice.

But my DSLR still smokes it.

There's the old maxim of "the best camera is the one you have on you." I'm happy I went with the pro, and in isolation, it's an amazing all around snapshot camera. Occasionally I get lucky with some stunning shot.

But the DSLR just wins hands down when it comes to shooting something like the foliage of a Japanese maple. The bokeh is beautiful straight out of the camera. The iPhone still struggles, and there's a ton of matte noise around edges that needs to be cleaned up. It's much better at things it was designed for, like portraits.

So, anecdotally, for me at least, it's a mixed bag. I love both cameras for different reasons but ultimately the DSLR still has the edge on quality. But the iPhone is always there, and has some tricks (especially low light) that the DSLR can't compete with.

For the foreseeable future, I don't see my phone fully replacing my DSLR.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sorry for bad english, and maybe I am deeply wrong, but:

In extreme cases, it even not "photo" as some information about photons recieved by some optic system with noise reduction afterwards. Not, it just pictures, based on recognised faces, objects and stars. And I don't know why, but I feel panifully bad about it. It is not approximation of world-how-it-is, but some expectation about world-how-people-want-it. It can recognise constellation based on few stars, and will draw nice picture of great stary sky, but will delete starlink sattelite, meteora or supernova as some unexpected noise.

<comment> GuB-42 You can think of these enhanced pictures as an artistic interpretation. Like a robot painter drawing your portrait. That's not a bad thing, good artists, and most likely good robots know how to make something look good while preserving the essentials. Unless I am doing astronomy, I'd rather have a beautiful night sky than a speck of dust that might be a starlink satellite. And if I am doing astronomy, having all the super-resolution features is really nice.

Unprocessed camera modes will continue to exist for people who want that. Maybe with some built-in digital signature in case it is used as proof.

Photography, and earlier that that, drawing, has always been world-how-people- want-it. Accuracy is just one of the things you may want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > This approach pioneered by the guys, who liked to take pictures of star > trails in the night sky. Even with a tripod, it was impossible to shot such > pictures by opening the shutter once for two hours

Yes, but also you can't leave a digital sensor collecting for two hours, the pixels start saturating and the noise builds up- not like film, which can do truly long exposures.

<comment><USER9> For what it's worth, film also suffers from reciprocity failure (nonlinear response at extended exposure times with low flux).

Some things were never easy.

<comment><USER10> Reciprocity failure doesn't stop you doing long exposures. It actually helps, if your goal is to make the exposure as long as possible. See e.g. [http://itchyi.squarespace.com/thelatest/2010/7/20/the- longes...](http://itchyi.squarespace.com/thelatest/2010/7/20/the-longest- photographic-exposures-in-history.html)

Digital sensors obey the reciprocity law to a much greater extent than film: [https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/37241/does- recipro...](https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/37241/does-reciprocity- failure-schwarzschild-effect-exist-in-digital-photography). The problems the OP mentions are not related to reciprocity failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is all really cool, but, there's one thing you can't make up for enough with processing: optical zoom, (digital zoom, however much temporal super resolution trickery, has a different angle).

<comment><USER12> DSLRs have exceptional lenses with exceptional but large sensors, which means the zooms are modest (up to around ~600mm)

So the really interesting long focal lenght cameras are the all-in-one superzoom cameras like the canon sx70hs and nikon p1000.

They accomplish the high magnification by using a sort-of-good lens with a sort-of-good small sensor, achieving up to 3000mm "equivalent" zoom.

Unfortunately, the "pro-sumer" design gives you an electronic viewfinder and slower less accurate focus and all kinds of other non-dslr mediocrity.

sigh.

<comment><USER13> The smaller cameras never really convjnced me as real DSLR replacements - <USER2> lacked the versatility and ergonomics of the DSLR and the smaller sensors meant more noise especially in dark scenes.

The first camera that I use that has started being ok is the pixel phone cameras using night sight to improve overall resolution and detail.

<comment><USER14> Define "smaller cameras". I (not so) recently replaced my Nikon D7100 with a collection of pro lenses with Olympus cameras (OM-D E-M1markII and OM-D E10markII to be specific). I could not be happier. The first one is small, has one of the best water/dust/freeze proofing available, extremely capable and customizable. Yes it has even smaller sensor than my APS-C Nikon had, but I can get better images with it.

One interesting thing about Olympus cameras, that they do have a lot of computational photography things described in the article:

\- there is a "Live Composite" mode, which allows you to get those star trails, to do light painting, etc.

\- there is build-in focus stacking, very useful for macro photography

\- there is hi-res mode implemented with pixel (or rather sensor) shifting

\- there is IBIS and digital image stabilization.

<comment><USER13> Smaller = anything smaller than a consumer grade DSLR.

The form factor make the smaller units far more difficult to hold properly while shooting, lack the optical viewfinder in most cases, etc.

The only thing a person needs for Star trails is a tripod and the sky. Stars start to "trail" generally anything over 500/effective focal length in exposure time in seconds.

Built in focus stacking does sound useful if it works well and macro shots are of interest.

Hi res modes are fine but it can never make your pixels bigger - bigger pixels of the same generation more sensitive to light so less noise at higher isos.

I have canon glass so tried one of their mirrorless cams and found its Ergonomics completely different to DSLRs and personally not in a good way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Yes, it opens up a lot of possibilities for us today, but there is a hunch > we're still trying to wave with hand-made wings instead of inventing a > plane. One that will leave behind all these shutters, apertures, and Bayer > filters.

> The beauty of the situation is that we can't even imagine today what it's > going to be.

Optical phased arrays of nanoantennas?

</comment><comment><USER16> here's my question - why isnt there a computational photography app startup that works on these phones (either android or iphone).

Let's take android - the snapdragon 855 is a very standard flagship CPU and is on tons of phones (including the 450$ Xiaomi K20 Pro). Why isnt there a computational photography app that works on these phones ?

Why is Pixel 4 - which uses the same 855 chip - the only one that has this software. Is it patent encumbered ? or is there some massive dataset deep learning stuff involved.

I'm surprised that there isnt a startup that is building these apps out there.

<comment><USER17> Issue may be that the algorithms are trained on specific camera unit and gathering a large database of data from all possible cameras may be difficult even for big guy like google. Google puts a ton of work into their camera app and you can get clones that work on other devices with varying degree off success. For example I have mi5s that uses the same sensor as first pixel and get quite decent results with arnova's gcam clone.

<comment><USER16> I'm not referring to GCam clone. I'm asking can't someone build this commercially? Like an app company that does computational photography apps for each kind of camera sensor?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So someday we can expect a $1000-ish smartphone which image quality-wise can compete with medium format gears like Fuji or Hasselblad?

<comment><USER19> I'd expect that at some point mirorless cameras will get close to feature parity at the computational photography part, and will beat smartphones handily by having the space for a good lens and slightly bigger sensors.

Cause all the tricks used on smartphones still work if you have a better lens and sensor. They will still yield these improvements. It's just gonna take a while for the manufacturers to catch up. Especially on the DSLR end, because of slow shutters and massive momentum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if there are any open source computational photography tools.

</comment><comment><USER21> Usually I don't mind reposting my articles but with a direct reference to original at the beginning [https://vas3k.com/blog/computational_photography/](https://vas3k.com/blog/computational_photography/)

Let's be respectful to the original author, I spent couple of months writing it:(

<comment><USER22> Hi Vas3k!

My name is Kate and I am Head of Content at Let's Enhance.

We are very thankful for the given material, because it's highly related to us.

And I want to clarify this unpleasant situation:

I've directly talked with the author of the article - Vas3k and asked for the permission to publish this awesome material. I can attach the screenshots of our conversation.

All the copyrights are reserved. We mentioned you and your blog as the original source. What's more, we've saved all the links in the article that refer to your blog.

So, all the accuses are unfounded.

<comment><USER23> Yes, I get this all the time too. Vaguely worded emails for permission to rip my stuff and any answer will be used as permission granted. You're in violation of copyright, and the author is right here to dispute your claim. As you are no doubt aware as students of copyright law you've now been told that your permission to copy has been rescinded which leaves you with only one option.

<comment><USER24> Call them on their bluff; ask them to "attach the screenshots of our conversation."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Flagging this. Paging dang for a link change and a ban on letsenhance.io.

<comment><USER25> What's the problem with letsenhance.io? Honest question. I skimmed the article and didn't see anything off-putting.

<comment><USER26> Maybe the fact that they copy-pasted someone else's content. Someone worked hard on this article and that person is not properly credited for that work.

Oh, and stealing ad revenue from the original creator.

<comment><USER27> I don't know if this was recently appended but at the end of the article there is this:

> The article was originally published by Vas3k in > [https://vas3k.com/](https://vas3k.com/) on 30.06.2019 Let's Enhance team is > very thankful for given materials.

Granted I still agree it's a blatant copy/paste and I also vote that dang replaces the link with the original.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is a truly incredible article.

And even a mind-bending (or optic?) glimpse into the future.

Thank you for writing it.

<comment><USER29> This is a complete rip-off of [https://vas3k.com/blog/computational_photography/](https://vas3k.com/blog/computational_photography/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> These hand-drawn-look diagrams are starting to become a bit of a cliche.

</comment><comment><USER9> This article is completely, utterly wrong as soon as it starts talking about anything plenoptic. Please disregard after that point as there are serious factual errors, particularly regarding what Google did or didn't do with Lytro.

(Source: I'm in the VR / plenoptic space, knew a bunch of people at Lytro, some of whom are now at Google. Timelines and facts do not match this article's assertions.)

<comment><USER23> That comment would be a lot more valuable if you corrected the record. To just gainsay what is written here accompanied by a strong reference to your authority is not how it is done imo, and if you can't or don't want to talk about it then you also shouldn't comment like this.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough. It would take a really long time to make a point by point rebuttal, but here are a few:

Phase detection is not the same thing at plenoptic; the article implies that phase detection operates in the same way as a microlens array. It doesn't; microlens arrays for plenoptic imaging have many pixels underneath, and perform different operations on them. This line:

"With only two pixels in one, there's still enough to calculate a fair optical depth of field map without having a second camera like everyone else."

This is categorically false. You need dozens of pixels underneath a microlens array to do digital refocusing; phase detection is not remotely the same thing.

Later, the author conflates microlens-based refocusing with camera-array based plenoptic imaging. These are wildly different disciplines; the work done in VR does not include microlens arrays anywhere. Not any. But they do include large arrays of cameras (see volumetric work from Microsoft HoloCapture, Intel's capture studio in Manhattan Beach, and my own company Visby's work — cameras at Radiant Images in LA... all arrays of cameras, no microlenses anywhere).

"Apparently, if you take only one central pixel from each cluster and build the image only from them, it won't be any different from one taken with a standard camera." This is false; taking the central pixel will give you an aliased image (or an image as though taken with a very, very high f-number lens, if the pixels correspond to the same zone of the aperture). To make an image as though you didn't use a microlens array, you sum all the pixels under the microlens to produce a macropixel. This is why light field cameras have lower effective resolution than traditional cameras. The remainder of the speculation about 'sneaky plenoptic JPEGs' has no basis in light field imaging; refocusing is not achieved by throwing away (or binning) pixels, it's done by summing different sets of pixels. Lytro founder Ren Ng's PhD thesis was about a way to do it faster by using the Fourier Slice Theorem. (Beautiful paper, if you have time to read it.)

Google did not "buy and kill Lytro." Lytro's assets were sold and Google bought some of them, but none of that tech made it into the Pixel line of cameras, period. The Google portrait mode is done using phase detect pixels as a cue for segmentation, as discussed in the article this blog links to. Nothing plenoptic required, and certainly no Lytro tech there. The blog post implies that the Pixel is using Lytro-like techniques rather than phase detect pixels to hint at segmentation for synthetic blur.

I have never heard of plenoptic cameras being used for image stabilization. In my personal experience (5 years of stabilizing cinema cameras for two different companies), virtually all stabilization issues derive from rotational blur, not translational movement. Your ability to stabilize translational movement would be limited to the aperture size, and translations of that magnitude have vanishingly small effects on the image unless the objects are very, very close to the lens (like macro). I have no idea where the blogger came up with this idea but there is no reference provided and I have never heard of it (nor would it work, for the above reasons).

The section "Fighting the Bayer Filter" miscasts the challenges of a Bayer pattern under a microlens; naively summing adjacent pixels under other microlenses would blur an image. You do get a boost to dynamic range from the synthesized images — you're binning a bunch of pixels to create your image, so you reduce noise as 1/root(n) in the number of samples. That could lead to better color in dark, noisy areas, but it will not increase the gamut of your sensor.

It goes on... but since this article was already off the front page by the time I posed my comments, this is probably enough.

(As an aside, Jacques — I really enjoy your writing!)

<comment><USER23> Thank you for adding this, I only saw it much later.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blogging with org-mode and Gitlab Pages - <AUTHOR> https://gjhenrique.com/meta.html <comment><USER2> Actually you can use ANY static site generator with github. Be it hugo, octopress, jekyll, hakyll or your own hand.

That should be obvious because the "host-ability" of a static site doesn't depend much on the tool you used to create it. If it outputs html file, a http server will serve them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. You're absolutely right.

I should make it clear that Github Pages also supports vanilla HTML.

But, if you're using Markdown or org files, you'll have to export your content to HTML in _your_ machine.

For Hugo, for example, you will need to install go, hugo, all its dependencies and always remember to manually type an extra command to turn your posts to HTML. Remember that you'll have to do this for ANY modification that you'd wish to do.

For the automatic generation, at least the last time I used, Github Pages only supported Jekyll.</comment></comment>


Why Google Fiber will never come to Seattle - <AUTHOR> http://crosscut.com/2014/03/04/business/118993/google-fiber-never-come-seattle-broadband-internet/ <comment><USER2> I think one of the best things about Google Fiber is actually how it is shining a light on the levels of bureaucracy in our governments and the ways they can either be a catalyst or an impediment to progress, innovation, etc.

I don't necessarily want more government or less government--I want better government, and more transparency on when our government is working or failing is helpful for getting there.

<comment><USER3> Not sure that can be inferred. Is innovation really catalyzed in Kansas City more than San Francisco? I would guess not.

<comment><USER4> Not sure if you've been to SF, but no one has ever accused the local government of "catalyzing" anything that didn't line their own pockets.

<comment><USER3> Markets and incentives work, and businesses respond to them. If SF thwarted innovation, we would see less of it there and more of it elsewhere, like Kansas City.

<comment><USER5> There are exogenous factors too. North Dakota will be rich due to oil even with incredibly corrupt and inefficient local governments.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, as are Texas, Alaska, and Saudi Arabia.

Resources must be extracted where they exist. No such physical constraints bind the development of search engines, social networks, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Can you imagine the Seattle City Council keeping a secret like this and then > acting on it in just one day? Of course not. We'd need to have endless > community meetings and hearings and public floggings of Google Executives.

Not to mention Kshama Sawant grandstanding about completely irrelevant topics. I can't understand how she got elected.

<comment><USER7> Because the majority of the people that voted in her district were tired of having an insular rep on the council, so they voted for The Other Guy? Seattle politics is quite strange, coming from the midwest. Politics isn't blood sport out here.

<comment><USER6> The election was city-wide (it's going to districts in 2015)

<comment><USER7> you're correct, of course. The differences seem extremely fine and closely cut to me, regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't even really want Google Fiber in Seattle - I want us to step up our game and make high speed internet a public utility.

But, alas, this article still hits on all the main points as to why this will never happen.

<comment><USER9> I am not one of the anti-corporate tin-foil hat Googlephobes, but I think that having one company with that much vertical integration over everything as important as the Internet is just a bit dangerous.

<comment><USER10> I doubt Google particularly wants to be an ISP, but something has to be done to break up the stalemate in the US. Google are one of the few companies with enough clout to actually get the ball rolling.

<comment><USER11> I am positive this is the real and only reason Google is doing this. It's the reason they became a browser vendor and the improvement in browser capabilities and standards has been glorious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seattle has Condo Internet and Cascade Link. Both provide gigabit. The Gigabit Squared thing fell apart.

Condo Internet uses a combination of microwave and fiber to provide connectivity to the buildings that they service. They only target apartments/condos, since building the infrastructure to individual residences is not worth it.

<comment><USER13> Are there any places with Condo Internet that might be considered affordable? Something less than $400,000, or $1300 a month rent? I'd be willing to move for this, but so far I've only seen it available in the $2000/month range.

<comment><USER14> I've been wondering the same thing - I live in a small studio now for an extremely low price, but have been considering upgrading for a multitude of reasons, including going from 12mbit Centurylink (the best I can get in my building) to gigabit Condointernet. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem possible to rent at a Condointernet served building for under $1800, which is a bit more than I'd like to pay (especially when I manage to eek by for under $700 with all utilities included).

<comment><USER15> you can get a 1BR at Neptune Apts in SLU for anywhere from $1400 - $1600

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Near my house the power runs on poles through a wooded area. Every year, when the wind blows, trees fall on it and take out the power. Sometimes twice a year. They're always out there replacing broken poles and pulling new wire.

I call the power company up now and then and suggest they bury the wire in the section. Or sometimes I'll suggest to the linemen as I pass them putting in a new pole. They get rid of me with some excuse they made up on the spot, and nothing changes.

<comment><USER17> Power systems engineer here. Mixing above and below grade conductor on the same distribution line is not a common construction practice, at least not downstream of the first customer. There are a few reasons.

Most faults seen on overhead distribution systems are momentary (i.e. they clear without human invention, e.g. line-to-line squirrel contact). For this reason, automatic reclosers are typically used at the station breaker. Conversely, automatic reclose is not used on underground distribution systems because momentary contacts are rare and attempting to reclose on a permanent fault just causes further damage to your breaker and other distribution assets.

Additionally, the types of conductor used for underground and overhead applications are completely different. They'd have to be spliced going into and out of the duct (you don't just put wires in the ground, you have to pour a concrete-encased duct) which adds an additional point of failure.

I understand that have two outages per year is annoying, but the thing about power distribution is that making a perfect system is much, much more expensive than making one that works most of the time for most of the people. And that money comes from your electricity rates.

<comment><USER16> The "last mile" to my neighborhood is actually underground. It's the feed to the community that's on poles, and the whole community goes down when a tree falls. I know about momentary ones where the power comes back on in a few seconds, those happen a lot, I am counting the ones where they have to send a truck out. The power is then out for from 6 hrs to 2 weeks.

As for rates, the paper ran an article a few years back on how much of our rates were based on the constant repairing of the poles - it was a big chunk, though I don't recall the details. Having a 3 man crew out there for several hours with their heavy equipment costs a bundle.

The underground section needed a repair exactly once, and the power didn't even go out.

About 2/3 of the homeowners in the community have given up and bought generators. Generators run from $500 to $5000 - I'd rather pay higher rates and not need one of those things.

<comment><USER18> Wouldn't it be cheaper to cut a wider path fr the power lines through the trees? Why don't they keep trees growth further away?

<comment><USER16> It's on some steep slopes, and cutting the trees down will destabilize the slope, besides making people mad.

They do trim the branches now and then.

I just don't see why it's so impractical to break out the Ditch Witch and cut a trench, and lay the durned cable in it. It was done for my neighborhood, and the developer wasn't known for spending excess money :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds like the analogies of Seattle being the San Francisco of the northwest (or vice versa) are correct... we have the same issues with bureaucracy, progress-fearing residents, etc. I actually thought I was reading the Pando article from a week ago ([http://pando.com/2014/02/25/having-being-burned- once-before-...](http://pando.com/2014/02/25/having-being-burned-once-before- google-wont-bring-fiber-to-san-francisco/)), and someone just did a s/san francisco/seattle.

<comment><USER3> Which city do you think Seattle or San Francisco should be more like? And why do you think businesses based in those two cities disagree?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Time Warner increased speeds in Austin after Google Fiber was announced? I guess that doesn't apply to either my home or work connection, they're both still as shitty as ever.

<comment><USER21> I live in Austin and have Time Warner Cable, my bill is roughly $173.00 per month. This is includes Internet (30 Mbps down/5Mbps up) and basic cable (no premium channels).

For people living in Austin, I doubt we will see increased speeds or better price offerings from AT&T/TWC until the day Google Fiber is available to significant portions of the city's population.

<comment><USER22> Holy shit, are those prices normal for Austin? Everywhere I've lived (Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee) I've paid roughly $40-50/month for just internet from Comcast that's also a bit faster than yours.

I've always been on promo deals, but even the "regular" price is $70-80.

<comment><USER23> TWC in Cary, NC for 5/30 service (nothing else, just Internet) is $72.38/month. And they just sent me a letter saying rates are going up.

My only theoretical alternative is AT&T but last I checked they don't even know my address exists (my house was built in 2004).

Meanwhile Wilson, NC built out its own network after getting fed up with broadband providers not willing to service her citizens. Of course that won't be happening elsewhere in NC since TWC successfully lobbied the state legislature to prevent other towns from doing so. Anyway, here's the pricing in Wilson [http://www.greenlightnc.com/about/internet/](http://www.greenlightnc.com/about/internet/)

        20Mbps Internet-only	$39.95
        40Mbps Internet-only	$59.95
        60Mbps Internet-only	$79.95
        100Mbps Internet-only	$104.95
        1Gbps Internet-only 	$154.95

All symmetrical. Much better than anything from TWC or Comcast or AT&T.

<comment><USER22> My hometown in the Chicago suburbs attempted to build out their own fiber network to provide service to residents sometime in the mid 2000s. I was in high school at the time, but I still get so damn angry thinking back on Comcast's explicit lobbying and campaigning against it. They sold the older population in town that it was this huge gamble.

I can still picture the signs Comcast put in people's yards. They were bright red, had dice on them, and said "Don't gamble with our tax dollars." There were letters to the editor in the local papers on both sides, but it was clear from almost the beginning that too few people understood the value of municipal fiber, and the vote didn't pass.

Today, my parents have barely functioning UVerse.

Also, your internet option is super gross, that's really too bad. I recently moved for work to a more rural area, but thankfully the same package was available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > So is all hope lost for Google Fiber in Seattle? What would it take to > entice Google here?

> We've considered spending the $700 million or more it would cost to build > our own fiber network, which might provide a billion dollars in benefits > each year.

Why do we want Google Fiber in cities so badly? What's the benefit over building your own network, or partnering with someone like Gigabit Squared?

<comment><USER25> It is not just about Google Fiber despite the article title. This article presents regulations that will prevent any real ISP competition, including Gigabit Squared, and is really quite depressing as a Seattle resident. Google Fiber just happens to be a significant national competitor that people know about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why Google Fiber will never come to Los Angeles [0]

[0] - [http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5070520/los-angeles- planni...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5070520/los-angeles-planning-to- bring-free-fiber-based-internet-to-its-residents)

<comment><USER27> What's stopping google from submitting a proposal? This article is about LA putting out an RFP.

<comment><USER28> Didn't LA's RFP say that they would give the kinds of concessions that Google Fiber demands?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The article is a little unfair to Seattle. Note the alacrity with which the city clamped down on Lyft and Uber - clearly you can get _some_ things done here if you know the right people.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've asked this question before [1].

Why does Google's proposed fiber map [2] include not a single city in the northeast or the Rust Belt?

Chicago, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh are all major cities that are at least "on the map" as far as tech is concerned. I know for a fact that the local authorities in Detroit, Cincinnati and Cleveland would bend over backwards for any project that has even the slightest whiff of economic development.

I can understand NYC being a special case that they don't want to deal with, but there are plenty of other cities in the region.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7265600](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7265600)

[2] [https://fiber.google.com/newcities/](https://fiber.google.com/newcities/)

<comment><USER31> Chicago is the king of Politics and needless regulation. Cronyism isn't something talked about in back allay's, it's a legitimate way to get a job/win a contract. No one looks twice at that. All comcast has to do to keep Google out is tell Rahm that he shouldn't let it happen and BOOM - no google in Chicago.

It becomes especially obvious in the winter when you see only certain parts of the city getting cleared immediately after a snow storm, those parts are where the alderman of that neighborhood lives, or a friend of the mayor lives on that block (and they'll do that, just plow a single block). Th rest of the city is plowed as well but it takes a couple days as the plows first have to do their crazy routes to make sure that major donors are all taken care of. I didn't really notice this until our alderman changed (I guess I used to live fairly close to the old one). The new alderman lives nearly a mile away from me and thus my block is one of the last in the city to get cleared where as in previous years, it was done directly following major streets. (the streets nearest to her are all plowed and clear immediately, and they're of the same significance that my street is, so it's not like balance was suddenly restored, they just moved the favor elsewhere).

It's really the only reason I'm a republican: this city is all blue and completely corrupt, I don't at all understand how people look at Obama, or Durbin, or Pelosi and don't see someone who has no morals and is in it for I don't even know what (as Obama seems to not even care about the power his position offers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google has a large office in Kirkland (near Seattle). I hope that means Kirkland is on the short list!

<comment><USER32> Well, Google has office in Seattle as well (Fremont).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The truth is that most places in the US have multiple layers of local and state levels of bureaucracy that make it extremely difficult for anyone who has not paid the "franchise fees" to string fiber. Even wireless is difficult since you need fiber to cell sites and all the same hurdles make it ridiculously expensive to get fiber to the towers. This is a problem that it almost impossible to solve on a large level since it is all controlled by municipalities and state puc's. This is why most people will never see GF or similar cheap Broadband in this country for a long time if ever.

</comment><comment><USER34> Didn't pioneer square just roll out broadband like a year or two ago on the city's dime because at $60k rollout cost none of the cable companies wanted to touch it? And that's supposed to a be a small business and startup friendly enclave!

</comment><comment><USER35> Would it be easier for Microsoft?</comment>


Dropbox Is Close To Finishing A Mega-Round That Could Value It At $5-$10 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/dropbox-10-billion-2011-8

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what are they going to do with it! Perhaps building datacenters of their own - it's not cheap to store everything in S3 after all.

<comment><USER2> Unless they're literally building out a new data-center from scratch, or hire- aquring the competition (which you'd think would be anticompetitive) I can't see how they can spend that kind of money on anything worthwhile.

Dropbox is great, but there are a lot of very compelling competitors. That's not to say it's not going to be the best service, but it's by _no way_ the only player in the game, and getting a round of this magnitude (if it's true) at this stage in the company's progression seems, for want of a better word, mental.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Nobody say the B word....</comment>


Show HN: Showing HN - <AUTHOR> http://showinghn.com/

<comment><USER2> <http://contrastrebellion.com/>

<comment><USER3> I agree to some extent (on this particular page the contrast is far too low). But low contrast has some benefits too--specifically, reduced eyestrain. On most sites, high contrast is fine, but if something is meant to be read-- blogs, articles, code, etc.-- I much prefer a more subdued colorscheme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't believe no one has complained about the font-weight/font-color being eye-straining...was HN down or something the past hour? :)

Rather than just a list, it'd be great (as someone else pointed out) to show upvote score. And then a way to show most upvoted in past week/month/year/all- time, as that is a view that is not-at-all easy to get from HN's interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the eye-strain; I switched it from #777 to #444 just now, so hopefully there's a marginal improvement.

My scraper isn't currently set to get that deep, but the most upvoted per time period is a good idea that I'll look into.

<comment><USER5> It's worse than just contrast. The text is so thin, light, and small, that parts of the glyphs can't even be rendered. There are literally not enough pixels to draw the open area of the top half of an "e" in the usernames below the titles.

<http://i.imgur.com/mnuFK.png>

Part of it is Chrome's messed up subpixel antialiasing (for which I've had an open bug report since September when they broke it), part is just making text way too small for anything but a 30" Retina display, if that exists.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've upped all the sizes so hopefully it's a bit better now. I had only tested it on an old Macbook and a Nexus 7, where the original font, size, and color were all very readable to me. Thanks for the heads up.

<comment><USER6> Still no good on Chrome. Remove Lato from body font.

<comment><USER7> Right! Just by removing "Lato" font in body {} and no more configuration, "Hevetica Neue" looks very nice to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great job. I can see myself checking this as Show HN are some of the most interesting posts I see here.

Here is some feedback:

\- I second the opinions that the text is a bit unreadable.

\- A lot of white space especially at the head of the page. On 1366x768 the first post is almost in the middle of the page.

\- Would be great to have more posts. Paging would work.

Additional features you may consider:

\- Maybe a screenshot of the page would make your site less plain. Checkout html2canvas <http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/>

Great stuff :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice concept. But I would like if you could display much more far back. And perhaps also how much upvotes each one got. Look at hneasy.com and maybe contact him.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! It's actually creating its own database so as time goes on, it will show everything since it's been running. I didn't want to scrape through the backlog as I've already gotten banned a couple times while making this (prompting pg's recent unban post) and I didn't want to push my luck.

The upvotes thing is tricky because it's very time sensitive. I thought about it for a bit, but besides the difficulty in judging when to update the points, it also goes against the goal that all Show HNs are given the spotlight even if they didn't do so well.

<comment><USER9> Makes sense. I will use your site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems good, as others have stated it is a bit low contrast.

I just have one small problem with the header/title. Right now it's click able on the whitespace surrounding the title. I've outlined this <http://i.imgur.com/isRbJ.png>

The red box is where it's click able now, and the green box is where I think it should be click able.

</comment><comment><USER11> I frequent this one <http://www.hnshowcase.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> That justshowHN blog on Tumblr is no longer active.

If anyone knows a good replacement show HN feed I could add to <http://skimfeed.com> let me know!

<comment><USER13> [http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6b3cef212d7de87581...](http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6b3cef212d7de875817dffb0171aa9ce&_render=rss)

This is the perfect job for Pipes. It's literally the only Yahoo service I still use, but it's awesome. I wish I could write my own modules, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Check out Show HN filter on hnapp.com: <http://hnapp.com/filter/9205b686fc8b9b396a0d40e43663116f>

</comment><comment><USER15> also check out hnshowcase.com (not mine)

 _knocked over by all the meta in hnshowcase showing showinghn showing Show HNs while showing other Show HNs_

</comment><comment><USER16> Can you have a filter to rank by points? Would love to sort based on that to see the best "Show HN". :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Suggestion: Enable an RSS feed.

<comment><USER18> I created ShowHNDaily.com to email Show HN postings. Feel free to use our RSS feed if you'd like @ <http://www.showhndaily.com/rss.xml>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> did this a month ago. my site is still in alpha copythisproject.appspot.com

</comment><comment><USER20> What did you build this in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Node.js with nothing fancy. It's only about 80 lines of code serverside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yo dawg.</comment>


VR essential to design of Nvidia's new headquarters - <AUTHOR> https://archpaper.com/2017/04/gensler-nvidia-new-headquarters/#gallery-0-slide-0 <comment><USER2> A friend of mine's husband built a new location for his business and the architecture firm used VR to helped him see what his place would be like. It seems only logical for much larger initiatives like this one to ensure that a lot of plans get revised earlier on in the planning process, such as figuring out the optimal lighting (as mentioned in the article). I'm sure most of us live in cities where we know of a story of an expensive project that had a mishaps because of a lack of foresight.

<comment><USER3> _> I'm sure most of us live in cities where we know of a story of an expensive project that had a mishaps because of a lack of foresight._

Like most of Gerhy's designs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just talked to a friend of mine who is an architect. He said most buildings look only good as model and when they are build they are only ugly blocks.

Even when rendered most architects play around with perspective to get their "ugly blocks" to look nice.

I said they should force the architects to design with VR and let them see the finished building from above only after they got the important stuff done, so the focus of the design is the people walking around and not the top down view on the building.

<comment><USER5> GPUs are capable of highly-realistic rendering now, so this is finally a viable proposition. And the VR hype will definitely go a long way to making this a reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first thing I thought of when I saw the photo of the interior of the building: panopticon.

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

</comment><comment><USER5> Have some unrelated Google Maps trivia I just discovered.

1\. Scroll down to the map and the end, and zoom all the way in. For me the tileset goes back in time to before the building was finished. I initially thought "wow, Google merged an overhead render from the architect!", but when I followed the "View larger map" link zooming in showed the completed building. TIL Maps uses different tilesets for different APIs!

2\. See your avatar at the top-right of the embedded map view? Hover that, and you'll see "+YourUsername", just like in the old +Google days. Wow :P

I'm guessing this site is using a legacy embed API or something. These were fun glitches to stumble on though.

<comment><USER7> Looks like zooming in switches to 3/4 perspective view. The top-down and 3/4 perspective images were taken at different times. When you click through to Google Maps, it will use the WebGL true 3D version which is, understandably, a completely different tileset. Unless your computer doesn't support WebGL, in which case you'll see the same 3/4 perspective imagery as before. The embed never uses WebGL, perhaps because it would be rude for a small embedded map to use a ton of your GPU memory.

If historical imagery interests you, Google has several options available:

The desktop Google Earth client will show you historical top-down aerial imagery that you can scrub through with a time slider: [https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148094?hl=en](https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148094?hl=en)

You can access historical street view imagery through the main Google Maps web interface: [https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/go-back-in-time- with...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/go-back-in-time-with-street- view.html)

For large-scale or global changes, there's [https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/](https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/) which is essentially a zoomable video of the entire Earth over the past 30 years at ~30m resolution.

For the true 3D imagery and 3/4 perspective view, I believe there's not currently a way to view historical versions (perhaps because stitching and reconstruction continues to improve and older versions would be low quality).

<comment><USER5> > _Looks like zooming in switches to 3 /4 perspective view. (...) When you > click through to Google Maps, it will use the WebGL true 3D version which > is, understandably, a completely different tileset. Unless your computer > doesn't support WebGL, in which case you'll see the same 3/4 perspective > imagery as before._

Problem: my old laptop _doesn 't_ support WebGL, and I'm seeing the new building at all zoom levels.

> _The embed never uses WebGL, perhaps because it would be rude for a small > embedded map to use a ton of your GPU memory._

That makes absolutely perfect sense - another thing is that the embed needs to "just work", and WebGL is in effect kicking in OpenGL; if the display stack isn't in sane condition (eg, misconfigured or buggy driver) it may cause lockups or other issues.

Thanks very much for the other links!

\- Google Earth is on my todo list of things to play with when I'm back on my i3

\- The historical street view thing is awesome and really useful, I agree

\- TIL about Timelapse, that is awesome. Thanks very much!

Your theory about stitching/reconstruction of old tilesets sounds quite plausible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why are headquaters allways non-modular? Usually such structures get to small the day, the company moves in. So why not integrate growth-ability into a building?

</comment><comment><USER9> Where is the parking for this new building?

<comment><USER10> If I recall, from the 2016 GTC keynote, the parking is in the basement. The CEO felt he was voting in favor of the environment by putting the cars underneath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So where are all the computer generated images?

<comment><USER5> I'm genuinely not sure what you mean. The hero image and the 3rd placement image are both CGI renders of the final building, FWIW.

<comment><USER11> You are right. But those types of image are also typically made using conventional techniques (although more labour intensive). VR gives you the opportunity to show the building from various angles as people would normally see it, and also from the inside. Hence I was expecting much more images, and not the typical images you see on a billboard next to a construction site.

<comment><USER5> Very fair point.

I guess the article was trying to drum up hype about the _possibility_ of being able to do what you describe.

IOW, this news article is saying "this should exist soon" in a "come on, get with the program" sense, because the industry is not quite there yet.

Having said that, I can perfectly understand your point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know this is pedantic, but Nvidia isn't really a "microchip maker" as the article says so much as designer since they're fab-less.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Message I've received: We thought you might like to know that we put [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125108) in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page sometime in the next 24 hours.

This is part of an experiment in giving good HN submissions multiple chances at the front page. If you're curious, you can read about it at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380) and other links there. And if you don't want these emails, sorry! Tell us and we won't do it again.

Thanks for posting good stories to Hacker News, Daniel (moderator)

<comment><USER13> I like this, but isn't it essentially the same as manual curation?

Not that I see anything wrong with that. I've lurked /new for a long time and noticed more and more spammy articles increasing the noise factor. I really think the whole thing is an arms race for views that can't really be stopped without a real person in the loop.

Perhaps you could start assigning reputation to a domain that's linked to how many good articles have come from there? This would encourage "friendly" SEO spam of good articles at least, lol.</comment></comment>


Lully – Sleep Assistant Device against night terrors - <AUTHOR> http://www.lullysleep.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> If this device works, it is the first tracking device application that i am quite impressed by. Basically it works like a sleep tracker alarm clock. These wake you up in the morning, when you are in a light phase sleep. But what it does instead is that it prevents your child from entering a deep phase sleep at the beginning of the night by disturbing its sleep. Adults sometimes experience something similar called the exploding head syndrome: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the comment! It actually doesn't keep children from entering deep sleep, that would be bad! Lully actually keeps children from going into unhealthy deep sleep that can lead to night terrors...</comment></comment>