Hacker News Reader

bahroon How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

The butterfly you've seen is a Diaethria species, also known as the "eighty-eights" for obvious reasons.

bahroon To tackle highest housing costs, hawaii's gov declares YIMBY martial law

> environmental groups have already denounced the proclamation's potential to allow for high-rises in residential neighborhoods

That's not an "environmental group." They may call themselves that, but there's no need for journalists to credulously repeat it. There is no "environmental" argument for preventing new residential buildings, even tall ones, from being built in existing urban residential neighborhoods. To protect the environment this is even necessary. I hope there are some real environmental orgs in Hawaii fighting back against greenfield development by supporting urban infill.

bahroon A vote against SB50 is a vote for California’s housing and homelessness crisis

This bill needs 21 votes to pass. It got 18 this afternoon, and its last chance is tomorrow.

Here is a list of senators that did not vote and the districts they represent: https://twitter.com/aceckhouse/status/1222676578708021251

Definitely definitely worth calling if you live in one of those districts, and encouraging friends and family to do so if they live there too!

bahroon Estimated $64M loss as SF street conditions and costs drive out Oracle OpenWorld

Unlike what the headline suggests, and how I'm sure this will be spun, the main reason for this was cost. San Francisco has some of the most expensive hotel inventory in the country.

Perhaps this is related to the very low number of hotel rooms in San Francisco -- 1/3 the number that exist in Atlanta, and 1/2 of the number in Phoenix. San Francisco makes it as hard as possible to add new inventory to this market.

bahroon Depression

Have you played Depression Quest? http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html

bahroon Convert a Bird Scooter to a personal one with $32 kit

Taxes on vehicles and gasoline do not remotely cover the costs of road construction, let alone the costs of urban parking. Private vehicles are intensely subsidized.

bahroon Lion Air crash: Boeing 737 plane crashes in sea off Jakarta

Well this is a pretty heartless way to refer to a disaster involving 188 people. (Title currently: "Lion Air's brand new Boeing 737 MAX8 crashes into sea")

bahroon United's final 747 flight sells out in hours

The 747 upper deck was United's best business-class product by far. Shame to see it go.

bahroon Launch HN: Sudden Coffee (YC W17) – Instant coffee that doesn't suck

Totally. If you can make instant coffee that tastes even okay, it would be revolutionary for backpacking.

Coffee is the most important thing my partner and I check to make sure we have before we enter the backcountry. And it's always instant, not out of preference or cost concerns, but weight.

bahroon Using logistic regression to predict parking difficulty

"When we started the training process, many of us thought that the “fingerprint” feature described above would be the “silver bullet” that would crack the problem for us. We were surprised to note that this wasn’t the case at all — in fact, it was features based on the dispersion of parking locations that turned out to be one of the most powerful predictors of parking difficulty."

I assume dispersion of parking locations is the distance from parking location to destination? I would have liked to see more about what kinds of inputs they used and how they cleaned them up to account for the confounding factors they mention (public transit users, private parking.)

bahroon Large stationary gravity wave in the atmosphere of Venus

To be clear, this article is about gravity waves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave), or ripples at the interface of two media of different densities caused by gravity, such as waves on the ocean or ridges of clouds, not gravitational waves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave), the propagating ripples in spacetime.

bahroon Flickr – A Year Without a Byte

Flickr's resized images have a characteristically (over)sharpened appearance.

bahroon New Macbook Pro can't walk and chew gum at same time (watch wifi and USB = fail)

Shitty third party USB-C adapter throwing off all kinds of RF.

bahroon What commercial flight route has the biggest number of stops/layovers?

You can compare these with some early 20th century routes from London to Australia, which had dozens of stops:

http://www.timetableimages.com/ttimages/complete/iaw35aus/ia... https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--M9zDODc...

bahroon Common swifts can stay aloft for up to 10 months

That's a really clever solution to a unique set of domain specific constraints!

bahroon What 18th-Century Paris Sounded Like

I coded a little thing for myself to do this a couple years ago: http://subject.space/postcards/4.html

bahroon Open Sourcing a Deep Learning Solution for Detecting NSFW Images

I should update my sexy map finder: http://exclav.es/2016/05/20/sexy-maps/

bahroon Show and Tell: Image captioning open sourced in TensorFlow

I haven't heard of one, but this is a good idea!

bahroon Show and Tell: Image captioning open sourced in TensorFlow

Why on earth would they distribute this without a trained model? Several weeks of training time on a multi-thousand dollar piece of specialized hardware are required to actually run this.

Google clearly has many different trained versions of this network sitting around. It must have been a conscious decision not to release them. Is the point to artificially create a barrier to entry for hobbyists that might want to apply this research? If so, why bother releasing it at all? I'm really scratching my head here.

bahroon The Itch (2008)

> Researchers at the University of Manchester, in England, have gone a step beyond mirrors and fashioned an immersive virtual-reality system for treating patients with phantom-limb pain. Detectors transpose movement of real limbs into a virtual world where patients feel they are actually moving, stretching, even playing a ballgame. So far, five patients have tried the system, and they have all experienced a reduction in pain.

Could be a pretty killer future VR/EEG (or are they using physical motion sensors configured to the "good" side of the body?) app.

bahroon Zika Is Coming

Yes. It is coronary heart disease.

bahroon Open California: an archive of free high-quality satellite imagery

Yep, Planet Labs uses tiny satellites. Their resolution advantage is temporal, not spatial.

bahroon To Sell a $1,000 Pill for $10 Without Losing Money

"According to Doctors Without Borders, which is critical of drug-pricing policies, it costs Gilead $100 to manufacture the 90 pills in the 12-week course."

Sounds more like a $1.11 pill to me. And it seems pretty straightforward to sell something at (a minimum) 90% margin and make money.

bahroon Why Neutrino Detectors Look So Damn Cool

To filter out particles that aren't neutrinos, which would otherwise cause noise on the detector.

bahroon Is it really worth running in the rain? (1987) [pdf]

If the rain comes, they run and hide their heads

bahroon Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

On a broader scale, how can we measure and understand happiness/quality of life? It is difficult to improve on factors that cannot be measured -- if the goal of technology is to improve quality of life (which I believe it is), then we need a way of measuring that holistically.

bahroon Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

Related to the basic income project -- questions about the societal impact of technology that the technology or business sector might be hesitant to investigate themselves.

For example, how do social networks, targeted advertising, etc. impact social dynamics and sense of self? Are these impacts positive or negative, and could technology improve them?

bahroon A New Kind of Landscape Photography

I believe that one of the reasons that it looks strange to us is that the image is captured using a "push broom scanner," where the satellite captures one line of the image at a time as it flies above the Earth, so the usual rules of perspective do not apply. The image is the same geographical width at the bottom as is it at the top.

bahroon Why Apple's Taptic engine in the iPhone 6S is more important than 3D touch

They do, a little bit, though.

bahroon Bay Area Living in Shipping Containers

In Los Altos, Brandon Williams crams 14 tenants into a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house -- where monthly rates for a bed start at $1,000. He leases the bungalow from a Chinese venture capitalist for about $6,800, which he can more than double when all the beds are occupied.

“This is scalable,” said Williams, 28, a freelance electrical engineer. “I know a guy who has about 12 of these.”

What a scumbag.