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FranOntanaya

727 karma · joined April 3, 2013

Hi! I'm a PHP cowboy coder, ffmpegger of videos and regexer of subtitles.
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FranOntanaya··on The Unemployable Programmer
I would look too into jobs where programming is an asset. I wasn't initially contracted as programmer (caption reviewer of all things), but managed to bring code into most problems, automate away lots of repetitive processes and create tools and workarounds for whatever we didn't have yet on our main app, or even to help customers integrate with our API. Conditions may not be as good as a plain software engineering position, but you may have a bit more freedom.
FranOntanaya··on Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?
To add,

* Good regexp chops in a scripting language.

* Cooking, because it's a proxy for skills in procedures, taste and aesthetics, and makes you more able to keep a healthy diet.

* How to set up, maintain and use a commuting bicycle. Easier and more productive than the gym.

FranOntanaya··on A call to PHP's mt_rand generates only odd numbers
This was my main doubt about PHP 7's scalar types, which will autocast values into the desired types. I don't expect the caller to know better than the callee what are the method's boundaries, and once casted you may not be able to see if the input was garbage. But yeah, when something breaks the method's author can wash their hands.
FranOntanaya··on Science vs. Engineering
"Imagine trying to build a device based on the information that acceleration due to gravity is probably between 9 and 13 m/s^2"

Software engineering must be a special case. Half of it is about handling uncertain states and preparing for unknown future uses.

FranOntanaya··on Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds
Intuition tells me this is like saying a droplet of water can both be a sphere and a single point because it'll pass through several holes on a net, but capillary action makes it collapse into a needle.
FranOntanaya··on Increasing Variety on Pluto's Close Approach Hemisphere and a Dark Pole on Charon
I'd love to see a simulation of particles moving around the Pluto Charon system. I've always wondered how they behave near the barycenter.

Here's some clues about what could cause the variety:

https://blogs.nasa.gov/mission-ames/2013/07/25/playing-marbl...

FranOntanaya··on DeepMind uses the Daily Mail as a huge training corpus for text comprehension
I am sorry to hear you won't believe the SHOCKING markov chains used by HACKERS to train artificial intelligence READING ROBOTS. Tell me more about it.
FranOntanaya··on Suddenly, a leopard print sofa appears
It could be that the dataset is so large there's very close matches to any common given picture, and the algorithm is actually awful at picking up details.

Giving it an image that we know has all the relevant details of a sofa, but it likely won't have close matches in the dataset, can give us an idea of how clever it is.

FranOntanaya··on Suddenly, a leopard print sofa appears
There's an alife program called DarwinBots where small bots powered by mutating code compete against each other to survive and reproduce.

Given enough time, you'd expect the to develop clever behaviors, but instead they just fuzz-tested the sim and locked in on exploits of bugs or environment settings. They only got a bit more clever when connecting different sims running on different conditions.

Eyes already use different kinds and densities of sensors optimized for either detail and color or movement/edges. I wouldn't expect a single learning method, even after optimizing it to its limits, to be above what two or more layers of different methods could do, especially when trying to avoid exploits like the tank story.

FranOntanaya··on To Lose Weight, Eating Less Is Far More Important Than Exercising More
Exercise and the lowered depression levels may be a good trigger for lowering the amount of confort food eaten and increasing diet discipline. The lower calorie intake still gets the credit, but many people may never get there without the exercise first.
FranOntanaya··on Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One (2014)
I use i3wm on a 15" laptop and usually have applications running on all nine virtual desktops.

I moved away from two screens with OpenBox because the window juggling was still killing me. Having two screens didn't cut it down that much, and tapping two keys to switch desktops and move apps in front of me is a lot simpler and quicker than translating between screens.

FranOntanaya··on Scientists have found more evidence for liquid water on Mars
This would be the first time they state there's liquid water naturally under one of our machines. For a starter, this is a huge problem regarding environmental protection. Regardless of the other factors against letting something like Conan the Bacterium take residence a few cm under the surface, I suspect if this had been suspected earlier (or those that suspected it were taken seriously), we wouldn't have sent the same kind of probes to the same areas, possibly not even having a Mars ground exploration program at all until we understood better how to do it without polluting the planet with terrestrial life.
FranOntanaya··on Thousands of Spaniards Leave Twitter for GNU Social
I joined a few months ago. It's not terribly active, but a lot of the active users are FOSS people, which makes for a very high signal to noise ratio. It's the only network nowadays where I don't just autopost from the blog and completely ignore it otherwise.
FranOntanaya··on The Mercedes Robo-Car That Made Me Want to Stop Driving
Mmh, considering automatic cars are more likely to carry a dashcam, I'm not sure anyone would want to do something illegal in front of them.
FranOntanaya··on Germanwings Tragedy: How to protect against mentally ill pilots?
My brain keeps blocking that bit -- apparently we can land rovers on Mars but we can't do collision checks on an airliner's autopilot.
FranOntanaya··on Germanwings Tragedy: How to protect against mentally ill pilots?
Perhaps any crew member should be able to switch on the autopilot from any part of the plane, then ground control or a timer would restore it.

It couldn't be that hard either to track the position of the crew in the plane and change the security thresholds depending on it.

FranOntanaya··on Elon Musk: human drivers are 'too dangerous'
Miles per passenger depend on too many factors. I'd stick with 1 death per 6,200 driver's licenses (US, 2009)
FranOntanaya··on High quality GIF with FFmpeg
ffmpeg doesn't get nearly enough credit. As long as you can grok the various settings, it makes you feel like McGyver with a paperclip. We work often with media from unusual sources, and after the first "can we do this with ffmpeg" filter there's very little left to handle.
FranOntanaya··on GPS tracking device found on an activist's car
Good luck finding a pickup in Valencia, though.
FranOntanaya··on Thunderbird Usage Continues to Grow
I keep asking Santa for regex email filters.
FranOntanaya··on Hard Drive Data Sets
Firefox on Ubuntu 14.10, same effect here.
FranOntanaya··on Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is yielding results
"The data are still being analyzed and have not yet been submitted to a journal for peer review"

Maybe the NewYorker could have waited for that to happen.

FranOntanaya··on Why We Should Build Cloud Cities on Venus
I think the problem could be water. The fraction of water vapor on Venus' atmosphere is ~200 times lower, although I don't know if that should factor that Venus' atmosphere would have many times Earth's mass.
FranOntanaya··on IBM says 'several thousand' layoffs on the way
Trying to wrap my mind around the number -- 6 employees per 100,000 people worldwide is equal or higher than the number of physicians per 100,000 in Benin, Ethiopia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Malawi, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tanzania, Togo and Zimbabwe.
FranOntanaya··on Lifespan depends on month of birth (2000)
I would think people conceived in warm weather are more likely to be from less stable relationships...
FranOntanaya··on Genetic brainfuck programming
You can see this with a sim called DarwinBots. Hand-crafted code is as clever as it can be. Code evolved from zero is a bunch of gibberish that just happens to hit the right spots here and there. The key is reverse engineering what effect the evolved code is actually going after.
FranOntanaya··on Dwarf Fortress, the Great Ancestor
DF is one of the top games at creating emergent scenarios, and yet not very good at it. Many parts are tedious, broken or not very fledged.

I really wish more games opened their AI, including conversation. Using them for little Turing experiments is a lot more fun than item mods.

FranOntanaya··on Richest 1% to own more than rest of world, Oxfam says
That doesn't match with the headline "top 1% owns nearly 50% of wealth." If 50% of wealth couldn't sustain the government for more than a few weeks, then that government would be running already on lollipops and rainbows.
FranOntanaya··on Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user
Probably to delete subfolders.
FranOntanaya··on Most MS Patients Who Got Stem Cell Transplants Still in Remission Years Later
I was wondering why your writing sounded so much as Aubrey's, then I found out you are supporters of SENS. I hope things aren't really too confrontational and damage repair can actually use some of the knowledge generated from epigenetic research.
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