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bangboombang

68 karma · joined January 28, 2020

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bangboombang··on Real Time Person Removal from Complex Video
Yes! Just take a lot of photos over a couple minutes (depending on how busy your scene is) from a fixed position, or just a video if you're lazy, then use imagemagick and combine them using "median" (NOT average). It's not always perfect but can deliver most of the time. That way even a command line dork like me can do it. :-)
bangboombang··on Real Time Person Removal from Complex Video
Green screen? Yes, it still requires some effort (buy and set up the actual screen, proper lighting), but I doubt a proper green screen setup would be outperformed by some AI system any time soon: Got a shitty cam? AI would have to fix that too. Shitty lighting? Still a problem after any background removal. And if you're gonna invest in those two things, might as well go for your green screen.
bangboombang··on NPM: 429 Too Many Requests
Idk, it wasn't much more annoying than the 400th person chiming in with a "me too" before that. I already might have completely missed a comment explaining the situation between all these.

Actually those animated gifs might have been better than all those "me too", since a text-only post informing about the situation would have stuck out much better.

bangboombang··on South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux
The bribe ends up in your pocket, the credible alternative only serves the general public.
bangboombang··on Apple's long processor journey
I think not being a real multi-user OS would have lead to trouble sooner or later, if it wouldn't have felt so unfinished in the first place. This was at the dawn of the internet, so you didn't really think about privilege separation on a desktop OS.
bangboombang··on 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
I tackled that project about two years ago. Asked around and a friend had an old laptop with FW port, so I installed Ubuntu on it and copied all my old Video8 and Digital8 Tapes.
bangboombang··on Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?
You still need a VPS or server of some kind, but if the "screen with irssi/weechat" concept sounds too much like 80s UNIX, there is quassel[1].

It's like a relay/proxy/bouncer but actually uses its own protocol between the GUI and core, so you get infinite backscroll, proper sync when running multiple GUI instances at the same time etc. Oh and there is a decent Android client called quasseldroid.

[1] https://quassel-irc.org/

bangboombang··on Number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rises in Japan
Yeah sure, they waste money on building these things and then not bother to put people in there for quarantine.

Great that these claims always come with no links to any halfway credible source.

Just like a few days ago this guy claiming in another thread that the hospitals weren't actually newly built but just some re-purposed resort facilities, with the construction videos being fake. Suuure.

bangboombang··on CIA bought an encryption company and used it to spy on clients and countries
It was consensus between colleagues/friends. And because you still need to trust open source software as well. I certainly don't have the time to review the code, and the "somebody else will do a thorough code review" fallacy should be well known by know. As said, Threema at least had a name attached to it that I somewhat trust.

Telegram for example doesn't exactly tick the "not as questionable" box for me, not least because it isn't entirely open source either, but also because I always find it weird if someone is pouring money into software that is available for free, with no obvious benefit for them in return.

bangboombang··on CIA bought an encryption company and used it to spy on clients and countries
Exactly my first thought. I like Threema and one of the reasons I was an early adopter is that the founder worked on m0n0wall before, an OSS firewall that I used for a long time, in contrast to it being just some guy I never heard of. It made me accept the closed source nature. Another big factor was that I indeed consider Switzerland to be a more trustworthy/neutral party in general when it comes to global politics, but this obviously doesn't have to apply to every single individual in that country.
bangboombang··on U.S. Officials Say Huawei Can Covertly Access Telecom Networks
Didn't mean you said it is. Just wanted to go further with that thought from my perspective, because I assume the majority of users on here are from the US and thus might not immediately see why this whole situation isn't as easy to decide on for everybody. Thus I just tried to lay out several aspects you might consider as an "outsider", and hopefully I didn't make it look like there is a final conclusion to that.
bangboombang··on Coronavirus outbreak likely now ‘gathering steam’
2 infected in Russia seems to confirm what you say. ;-)
bangboombang··on U.S. Officials Say Huawei Can Covertly Access Telecom Networks
Which isn't that easy, since the world isn't black and white. And do I even care about morals, or mostly just about my personal data?

As an American it's probably easy to make a choice here, but as a 3rd party I'm not so sure. The US has definitely wreaked more havoc across the globe during the past century, from overthrowing democratic governments to bombing the shit out of countries. The Chinese are reckless whenever they see someone threatening their authority, but egoistically speaking, that 99% applies to Chinese nationals or people living in China. Not my problem.

If my country would go with US equipment, I already know they will get all my data because of things like the patriot act and all the niceties Snowden revealed the NSA et al have.

The Chinese probably have the same, but we don't know anything definitive, which makes it more scary, also they are evil commies. But then again, having access to telco infra only means they get meta data, since traffic is all encrypted nowadays, while the US still gets all my content thanks to Facebook/WhatsApp, Google/Gmail, Amazon, ..., no matter what the 5G equipment is. So is it safer to then say you better buy the 5G stuff from the US so only one party can steal all your data?

bangboombang··on Airbus unveils 'blended wing body' plane design after secret flight tests
Yes, after the 737-MAX I absolutely want more computers, AI, blockchain, cloud, microservices, HTTP/3 and big data in the planes I'm boarding.
bangboombang··on “We already store data. In a database. It works well”
I've been on the internet for so long that I genuinely don't know whether this person is serious or trolling hard.

Also that person chiming in calling Jimmy anti-capitalist cracked me up.

Oh an OT: WTF is a cashtag? I'm not using Twitter, the linkified $BSV in the very first message was new to me, and on hover the URL reveals it's a cashtag. I'm feeling old.

bangboombang··on Systemd Home Directories
There have been several issues over time. My general problem with it was complexity. What finally broke the camel's back for me was that for unexplained reasons, sssd stayed in "offline mode" after system standby for 30-60 seconds. We could validate that the network connection was back up after max. 5 seconds, but there was no way to get this thing to go online again. So basically we had to tell our users that they won't be able to login after system standby for a minute or so.

This was impossible to debug. You could send some signal (USR1 or 2 iirc) to sssd to force it into online mode, we even tried a crude script that would run after system resume and spam sssd with that signal for a minute to no avail. Shortly after I left that department the decision was made to move to Centrify. It's a pita in other ways apparently, but everything I know about it is just from hearsay from old colleagues aynways.

bangboombang··on Model built by researchers suggests coronavirus outbreak began in November
I read it that the person got sick after the visit to Wuhan but recovered from that before the visit to OP. Hence 3+ days should be enough to rule out a possible infection of OP with whatever the scientist had.

Since they traveled to Wuhan in December, from then to last week, that would've been more than 24 days, so in case they did not get sick yet and I read that wrong, it should also be pretty much impossible, since that would be the longest incubation period of ncov by quite a bit.

bangboombang··on Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015)
Same here. That's usually the kind of videos I watch, cause I'm not that interested in seeing benchmarks of the latest RGB memory sticks, or any other memory sticks, GFX cards, headphones for that matter.

When I saw his LAN gaming center I though it would be cool if he'd retry that project for that. :->

bangboombang··on Model built by researchers suggests coronavirus outbreak began in November
If he's been symptom free for 3+ days then no.
bangboombang··on Systemd Home Directories
It sounds like enterprisey RedHat trash. Probably for better Active Directory integration, hence only CIFS is mentioned but not NFS.

And they might actually achieve this there, since SSSD is another abomination that kinda does that and mostly works, but once it doesn't and you try to debug it, you want to stab yourself in the brain with a dumb object.

For any other distro, I very much hope this thing is not enabled or even installed by default. Since I don't get the complaints about ecryptfs. I've been using it since around 2012 on multiple machines, multiple dist-upgrades and password changes and it never failed me once. Oh and SSHing into the machine works as expected!

bangboombang··on Show HN: Simple JavaScript VPN detection using timezones
Maybe add an error message if ipapi.co isn't reachable.

uBlock blocked it on my end, and all I see is the "learn how it works" link, and above that is invisible text saying "Browser Timezone" and "IP Timezone".

bangboombang··on Using neural networks to upscale a famous 1896 video to 4k quality
Somewhat OT: Can someone enlighten me why exactly we need to "speed correct" them in the first place?

It always struck me as odd that those old b/w clips were often shown playing too fast on TV. Isn't it more like they were simply recorded at lower fps rates? Then how can you call this speed correcting, when you merely just played them at the wrong frame rate before, just because TV is 25/30/50/60/59.4i² frames/fields per second and you didn't want to convert it in any way. And then suddenly a few years ago these speed corrected versions started to pop up on the internet, like "hey we just fixed the past, people didn't actually move twice as fast back then!"

I guess I just don't like the term, but maybe there is more to it.

bangboombang··on A new hash algorithm for Git
Oh dear god. Because it's git related, my brain somehow still tries to make sense of that stuff because it just seems so real.
bangboombang··on A new hash algorithm for Git
This is pretty interesting and shows you shouldn't try to pull any sort of stunts if you're not a crypto expert. I've actually wondered before whether md5 + sha1 would result in something stronger than those two used individually. Now I know.
bangboombang··on Coronavirus Forces World’s Largest Work-from-Home Experiment
Imo the model of those Australian scientists from a few days ago forecasting 75k infections in China by Feb. 4th was pretty spot on.

Official numbers in China right now are 17k infections plus 21k estimated unreported cases.[1] Let's assume their numbers are a little too optimistic and there you go, 75k by tomorrow.

[1] https://news.qq.com/zt2020/page/feiyan.htm

bangboombang··on Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally
I wouldn't even call this a Chinese trait exclusively. It's definitely more pronounced there, but when didn't governments and companies all over the world lie about mishaps until it wasn't possible to hide the truth anymore? Look back no further than Iran shooting down that plane. That thing was crystal clear, yet they tried to deny it at first. The difference is that the Chinese government can mostly hide the truth when it comes to their own citizens though...
bangboombang··on WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
You got any sources for that b/s?

Like the hospitals being almost finished resorts? They are building these things from the ground up, there was nothing there, you could even see this in those live streams, from multiple camera angles.

bangboombang··on Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?
Cool, I'll try this on my XT clone one day to see the performance :-D
bangboombang··on Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?
...Getting my old Windows Phone ready!

Do you actually deliver different versions of the site depending on browser, with more and fancier features for modern browsers, or does it look the same on everything (with different CSS/JS fixes for all the horrible old browsers)?

bangboombang··on Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?
Huh, does mTCP ship an ssh client now, or are you building it yourself?
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