Hacker News Reader

ansonhoyton Tacotron 2: Generating Human-Like Speech from Text

Arstechnica mentioned this research in an approachable article [1] on the challenges of getting speech recognition and generation working for more languages. I found it fascinating.

Very cool stuff.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/teach...

ansonhoyton Face ID, Touch ID, No ID, PINs and Pragmatic Security

Once it is reported stolen, it could capture the face of everyone who tries to access it. If you assign your police case number in iCloud, it could automatically send your police department these faces (with times and locations) to expedite recovery. With all the face databases popping up, they'll easily have a short list of people to follow up with.

Then again, this might create lots of other problems.

ansonhoyton Learning to Squat

I like "Rodney Yee's A.M. Yoga for Beginners". It is gentle enough for when you're just getting started and only 15-20 minutes. It doesn't feel like much, but after several days you'll start to notice more flexibility. I start here whenever I've stopped exercising for a while.

ansonhoyton Bootsnap: Optimizing Ruby App Boot Time RSS

Shopify released their key boot optimizations as a useful gem. Optimizes several boot time hot spots for general Rails applications, getting your unit tests or developer server running significantly faster. May save 50% on smaller apps, and 75% on larger apps (like Shopify).

ansonhoyton Choke Point of a Nation: The High Cost of an Aging River Lock

I missed where the article mentions the efficiency figure. Can you point me to it? I read it and looked for "30", "rail", "train", "fuel", "efficiency", etc.

ansonhoyton Mercedes-Benz shows off the first fully electric heavy urban transport truck

Interesting graph, but I don't think we can say cutting tire noise won't help. While tire noise is significant, so is engine noise.

If electric cars are "half" the noise problem of ICE ones, that's still a huge win.

ansonhoyton Rails 5.0: Action Cable, API mode, and more

Agreed, the attributes API work is perhaps the top improvement for me.

ansonhoyton Supercomputer quietly puts U.S. weather resources back on top

Cliff Mass also blogged [1] about the NOAA supercomputer. While a day after the USA Today's article, many folks appreciate his perspective. He's posted on this several times in the past year [2].

[1] http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-national-weather-s...

[2] https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=supercomputer+site:+cliffmas...

ansonhoyton The Rails Doctrine

For me, magic isn't the problem. I like the magic of conventions, but not when it is painful to pull back the curtain. For Rails, I think pain comes when magic stands on poor internals, which gets amplified when gems layer on their own painful workarounds...and I have to sort through all of it.

That's why I'm excited about Sean Griffin's work on the [Attributes API](http://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Attribut...). To do it, he's had to refactor out a lot of internal monkey patching so that (in Rails 5) there is only one source of type information for an AR model. This means gems can extend AR, I can extend AR, new requirements can walk into my door that I can deliver on without monkey patching or opening Pandora's box of a patch of crappy Rails internals. The magic is still there, but it's done it a way so the magic doesn't fall apart in unexpected, unmanageable ways. That's what matters to me.