Hacker News Reader

Part of the original rationale for Eevee was to replace Blender Internal.

dtfon British Airways faces record £183M fine for data breach

Ah thanks, I missed that. It usually all goes to HM Treasury but this is a joint operation between multiple EU supervisory authorities.

"ICO has been investigating this case as lead supervisory authority on behalf of other EU Member State data protection authorities. It has also liaised with other regulators. Under the GDPR ‘one stop shop’ provisions the data protection authorities in the EU whose residents have been affected will also have the chance to comment on the ICO’s findings."

https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl...

dtfon British Airways faces record £183M fine for data breach

The Treasury. Fines are sent to the Consolidated Fund (the government's general account at the Bank of England).

dtfon British Airways faces record £183M fine for data breach

The maximum fine of 4% of parent company IAG's turnover would have been almost €1bn.

dtfon Blender Is Free Software

A senior lighting artist on the film mentions a few difficulties in the comments below.

- motion blur render times. (They patched Cycles to use Embree as its ray engine to solve this)

- memory consumption

- lack of UDIM

- clunky compositor

https://www.blendernation.com/2018/08/20/next-gen-blender-pr...

dtfon Blender Is Free Software

Cycles (Blender's built in path tracer) with some modifications. (Cryptomattes are now in 2.8, and the Embree patch will be integrated somewhere after.)

"Yes, cycles was used for everything, though our version of cycles was modified (with stefan's embree core, and crypto-mattes which were beyond valuable for compositing). The version of blender we used was the studios own dev version (which I believe was using blender 2.78 as it's base?)"

https://www.blendernation.com/2018/08/20/next-gen-blender-pr...

dtfon Adventures with ffmpeg and color ranges

Another site that comes to mind is the Financial Times, which uses UUIDs for article urls, with no other indication of content.

https://www.ft.com/

https://www.ft.com/content/13be9132-8149-11e9-b592-5fe435b57...

dtfon Guardian records first operating profit since 1998

Are you talking about general opinion pieces or the Times regular columnists? The Guardian does have a pretty diverse Comment section [1]. As far as the regular columnists go, it's true they don't really have a right-wing Owen Jones, but for instance, Matthew d'Ancona is conservative, and Larry Eliott is a Lexiteer.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/commentisfree

dtfon Guardian records first operating profit since 1998

On Brexit: it's worth noting that Larry Elliott, the Guardian's economics editor, is a long time Eurosceptic and committed supporter of Brexit. He regularly pens pro-Brexit articles in an otherwise largely Remain-slanted paper (although obviously he's coming from a Lexiteer angle), and this amusingly confuses many Guardian readers in the comments.

On Falsehoods: as far as I know, Luke Harding's scoop on Manafort meeting Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy has not been stood up, and seems to have gone quiet. While not a deliberate falsehood, this is an embarrassing misfire.

But I do agree it's a remarkable paper, one I'm happy to contribute to.

dtfon GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

Yes, the construction "for the nonce" goes back to the Middle Ages. The concept of a "nonce word" goes back to 1884, according to this article.

https://www.dailywritingtips.com/nonce-words-for-the-nonce-a...

dtfon GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

Once is from the Middle English "anes", meaning "one".

Nonce is from "then anes", meaning "the one".

The "-n" got smooshed into the latter word, to become "nonce", rather like "an ewt" became "newt".

dtfon Who has the fastest website in F1?

Jake is UK based. https://twitter.com/jaffathecake

dtfon MathML in Chromium

Here's an example of why MathML is attractive as a rendering layer (try Firefox vs Chrome, and look at native MathML latency vs MathJax emulation):

https://runarberg.github.io/ascii2mathml/

(it helps to have the LaTeX Computer Modern fonts installed locally, which for some reason aren't imported on this page)

dtfon Intel Open Image Denoise: High-Performance Denoising Library for Ray Tracing

Intel's graphics libraries are well crafted and pleasant to integrate. In fact, Embree is currently being integrated into Blender's Cycles as an alternative ray engine.

I'd guess we'll see an effort at integrating the Intel denoiser fairly soon as a plugin at least.

Someone recently released a Blender plugin using the NVIDIA Optix denoiser, which I think couldn't be directly integrated due to licensing issues:

https://remingtongraphics.net/tools/d-noise/

dtfon Field notes: London, England (2018)

"The one dark spot on my stay in that neighborhood was one night I walked to a pharmacy a few blocks away from the hotel, and two men on a motorcycle drove up on the sidewalk and tried to snatch my phone out of my hand."

Lovely to read this travelogue, but my heart sank when I read this, as it's an unfortunate reality of living in London at the moment. Thankfully the author was quick enough to evade them.

Be careful about using your phone on the street, day or dark, as it's extremely obvious from far away (eg for somebody sat on a moped pillion) when a potential victim is engrossed in their phone-work and not 100% attending to their surroundings.

Many friends and colleagues have suffered from this scurge, and the moped oiks really have no scruples (one friend was heavily pregnant when she was mugged).

Take care, but don't let that put you off enjoying a great city.

dtfon The Riots in France Are What Happens When Facebook Changes It Algorithm

On the wealth tax - yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_tax_on_wealth

Part of Macron's reforms. But not a good look, in hindsight.

And the benefit cuts didn't go down well, either.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/24/housing-benefi...

dtfon The Riots in France Are What Happens When Facebook Changes It Algorithm

I just read this from the Guardian's Paris chief, thought it was a pretty good sampling of some of the grievances:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/07/macrons-arroga...

Seems a common complaint is that Macron looks great from abroad, but he's ignoring the people at home.

Also worth checking this tweet from the French government account:

https://twitter.com/gouvernementFR/status/107096383300978278...

"Protest is a right, but let's do it properly.", overlayed on montage clips of good protesters and bad protesters.

Finally, the recent images of students being made to kneel with hands behind their heads by riot police is not going down well anywhere.

dtfon JAB Code – A high-capacity 2D color bar code

The problem in this case, is that it's the terminology used by the standard:

https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Publicat...

dtfon Cadbury ‘pushing orangutans towards extinction by wrecking habitat for palm oil’

It's been an incredibly astute comms strategy from Greenpeace. They made this film, then did a deal with Iceland (who were keen to reposition themselves as a supermarket with green credentials). Both parties admitted they knew it would be "bannned" by Clearcast. Greenpeace are now riding the inevitable public outrage by drip releasing their palm oil research to put huge public pressure on big brands. It's very impressive.

dtfon Base58

Not to be confused with Base85.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii85

(used with various alphabets for denser binary encoding in PDF, git binary patches, and the scene files of the Arnold renderer).

dtfon Tech giants face 2% UK digital services tax

It’s the second biggest economy in the world. They’re not that backward.

dtfon The D Language Front-End Merged Into GCC 9

It's an odd word, isn't it? I can't speak for the inimitable Walter Bright, but I suspect many English speakers like myself enjoy the pure sound of it - so many consonants in such a short space of time. Somewhat difficult to pronounce, slightly archaic, it perhaps confers a little more kudos than commoner alternatives. (And thoroughly deserved kudos, in this case!)

dtfon Swallowing the elephant (part 1)

Another series on this mammoth dataset:

1. https://schuttejoe.github.io/post/disneybsdf/

2. https://schuttejoe.github.io/post/disneypostmortem/

dtfon New in Chrome 70

I just noticed that [4] doesn't work on Safari or Firefox either (but does on Chrome) on my MacBook 2010. Maybe it wasn't the best demo of that feature ...

The API is pretty well supported on tablets and phones though, which is where the main use case is.

dtfon New in Chrome 70

If you're talking about the DeviceOrientation event [1], it's been shipping in browsers since 2010 [2,3].

It also works on your MacBook. [4]

[1] https://w3c.github.io/deviceorientation/

[2] https://caniuse.com/#feat=deviceorientation

[3] https://www.engadget.com/2010/07/06/google-chrome-gets-some-...

[4] https://simpl.info/deviceorientation/

(PS my humble opinion is "yes we should". I like being able to develop a heart rate monitor PWA for my phone, and I don't see what's different from granting some random native app the same access. At least with the web I can read the underlying code.)

dtfon Show HN: Physically Based Rendering – Online Edition

Fantastic news and amazing work, the site looks beautiful! I love my copy of PBR but it's always been a tad on the heavy side for casual reading :)

The image viewer works brilliantly and the renders are looking gorgeous. Looking forward to spending some hours with this on my iPad later.

dtfon Walt: JavaScript-like syntax for WebAssembly

It's not a JavaScript imitation. This is a JavaScript-like syntax for writing WebAssembly. Other than that, (excepting the closure helper) it's 1-to-1 WebAssembly.

Not everyone enjoys writing verbose S-Expressions [1], even if it makes for a good canonical format.

If you despise JavaScript so much that you can't bear the thought of something that vaguely looks like JavaScript, then don't worry there are other "skins" for writing WebAssembly [2-4] and it should not be too hard to write your own.

Finally, nobody owns WebAssembly. It's for clever people like yourself just as much as it is for dirty JavaScript programmers like me.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Text_fo...

[2] https://github.com/tmcw/wah

[3] https://github.com/serprex/luwa

[4] https://medium.com/cirru-project/webassembly-s-expression-an...

dtfon Brex Has Amassed A Valuation Of $1.1B In Under Two Years

It's tickling to see this dynamic new company with a name so close to an event that inspires such fiery passions in my country.

Recently I've noticed that The Sun, Britain's foremost tabloid and an ardent supporter of aforementioned event, have started shortening the name to "Brex" in a few of their headlines. [1]

And now I'm also thinking of another company that ended up renaming themselves to avoid connotations with the name of the original event that inspired the name of the subsequent event that may or may not have inspired the name of this product. [2]

[1] https://twitter.com/TheSun/status/1046513253843718144

[2] https://qz.com/510040/grexit-the-unfortunately-named-softwar...

dtfon Anatomy of a Killing

Here is the full video package on this from BBC Africa:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbnLkc6r3yc

dtfon Anatomy of a Killing

Those final statements on the Twitter thread stuck out for me too - they seemed a little incongruous. But they're taken (as is the entire thread) from the BBC Africa video, where they actually make perfect sense as the closing remarks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbnLkc6r3yc

I'm not sure whether it's the medium (Twitter), or the lack of editing that makes them jar in the thread.