Hacker News Reader

dtfon Kent Sorenson: The tea party hero who lost everything

It's still on the front page.

dtfon Inside look at modern web browser – part 4

Well that was interesting, and I had no idea that "getCoalescedEvents()" existed. I've been a little disappointed when trying to write drawing applications before - circles end up looking like polygons unless you add some kind of interpolation.

So today we have mouse events, touch events and pointer events. And due to the demands of modern platforms we have things like these passive and cancellable flags. Is there any kind of best practice these days on how to handle user input? As far as I know, iOS doesn't support pointer events (I'm not even sure Chrome was keen on them until recently?) Do I just have to register handlers for all three? Does that affect performance?

And is there any way to get pen data into my browser (pressure, tilt, proximity, ...)? I remember this used to be possible with a plugin (eg the Wacom plugin), but I've been disappointed every time I've looked at pointer/touch event pressure values.

dtfon EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

Correct. Boris owns the bus, Nigel owns the poster.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farag...

dtfon Krukenberg procedure

Bit of a flippant tone, but I found this video that shows a man who had the procedure after bilateral amputation following an accident with dynamite. He sounds pretty satisfied with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8yMNuNgxyo

dtfon SIGGRAPH 2018 Papers: Machine Learning, Graphics, and Rendering

And here's [1] Stephen Hill's list of links for 2018:

[1] http://blog.selfshadow.com/2018/08/16/siggraph-2018-links/

dtfon Nvidia Unveils Quadro RTX, a Raytracing GPU

The original Coco frame times were 1000hrs/f, thanks to millions of light sources (and coming in at 30GB to 120GB of scene data). But engineers got that down to 50hrs/f over the course of production - light acceleration structures that have now ended up in RenderMan 22. (These numbers are single core benchmarks, so you then need to scale by some factor of numbers of cores you have available). In general, I think it’s the huge scene data size that keeps feature films mostly on the CPU.

https://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermans-visuals-for-coco...

dtfon A Ray-Tracing Pioneer Explains How He Stumbled into Global Illumination

Rhino3D integrated Blender’s open-source Cycles renderer.

https://github.com/mcneel/RhinoCycles

dtfon How Britain beat the odds to achieve space flight, and then abandoned it

Ahem... The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, if you please (for the time being, at least).

dtfon How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions

Great work! So I guess it's this CDC Omega / 480 Model III, as described in this March 1979 Computerworld?

https://imgur.com/a/8TKIqNN

(edit: and here's a manual I found for the Model I. Does indeed sound like a System/360 compatible. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/omega480/22291359A_OMEGA_48...)

dtfon How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions

"Before each bi-annual game, Jacobson arrived at the drab Dittler Brothers’ office at 5 a.m to observe their Omega III supercomputer making the McDonald’s prize draw."

Does anyone know what the 'Omega III supercomputer' is?

dtfon Learn new technology through writing a tutorial about it

Excellent points. I've come to appreciate that this explosion of tutorials and choice on the modern web is not a bad thing.

It seems rather like keeping up with the news - you can either read for (maybe pay for) one high-quality, authoritative guide. Or alternatively you can skim many and develop your own sense for quality and veracity by noting the similarities and contradictions between what they each say.

dtfon European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

"It will be available once the minutes for the meeting have been compiled in the days to come." (from @EP_Legal)

https://twitter.com/EP_Legal/status/1009418817393577985

dtfon GDPR: Don't Panic

What targets? Where have you heard something about targets?

dtfon Firefox 60 released

Native modules have brought the fun and immediacy back to development for me. I never quite got used to the delay and boilerplate of build systems, despite their power.

But performance seems a little inconsistent in production. For iOS Safari in particular, I've had apps take over a minute to load via modules, versus seconds when bundled. So I stick to rollup for deploy (maybe http2 is supposed to fix this?)

(great demo btw!)

dtfon Trump's Campaign Payments Totalling $130K

Here's Susan Simpson's latest blog on the matter, with some interesting thoughts on what might have happened and why:

https://viewfromll2.com/2018/03/11/on-the-origins-of-stormy-...

dtfon EU wants to require platforms to filter uploaded content, including code

Is the GDPR a bad thing? Previous commentary on HN seemed broadly positive.

dtfon Britain’s White-Collar Cops Are Getting Too Good at Their Job

Consider this with BuzzFeed’s reports on the recent string of suspicious Russia-connected deaths in the U.K. (police seeming to close cases either out of fear, lack of resource or advice from the security services) and the future is looking worrying.

dtfon Open Source Color Management Is Broken

It’s mainly in large facilities that run huge jobs with massive amounts of data. Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Flame, Baselight, many in-house VFX software all run perfectly well Linux. And of course the cornucopia of renderers running on their server farms, as might be more expected.

The lineage is from SGI, where many of these applications were born, but as the company faltered and consumer graphics hardware took off thanks to gaming, Linux became the natural home.

dtfon Vectorized Production Path Tracing

Price, I think. Small outfits do use GPUs in production.

edit: I think another reason might be something to do with the gigantic asset sizes (eg textures) typical in big studio jobs.

dtfon WebGL2 Fundamentals

How do I run it on my computer?

dtfon WebGL2 Fundamentals

How do I run that in my web page?

dtfon Tricks to make yourself effortlessly charming

On a related note, Sky News body language review of 2017 is quite fun.

https://youtu.be/l4n67_dbaC0

It’s interesting how the eyebrow flash and the smile are promoted in this BBC article on charm, yet perhaps did not do Hillary Clinton so much good in this age of the strongman. Women have it tough getting the tone right in politics and business.

dtfon New York's vanishing shops and storefronts: 'It's not Amazon, it's rent'

The evening standard has recently started promoting a made-up place called "North Mayfair". I assume it's part of the same strategy.

dtfon Carve your own spoon (2014)

Still around in 2017, it seems:

https://barnthespoon.com/

dtfon FT Person of the Year: Susan Fowler

Much of the FT's output is about the business of business, and they've covered Uber and the fallout from Fowler's revelations extensively. It's not a stretch.

(A very cynical person might mention the FT's recent trouble with gender pay gap, but I'd say Fowler's impact remains clear.)

dtfon FT Person of the Year: Susan Fowler

According to editor Lionel Barber, Fowler was up against the likes of Macron, Xi, MbS, Musk and Bezos.

https://www.ft.com/content/7ab21e44-de85-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f...

dtfon macOS High Sierra: Anyone can login as “root” with empty password

Amazingly, this was disclosed offhand on the Apple developer forums, two weeks ago (see final comment by chethan177):

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/79235

(spotted by https://twitter.com/fristle/status/935670476214378496)

dtfon Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

Things have got a little better since Viner stepped in. Good take on the state of newspapers, and the particular success of the FT, from ex-editor of Guardian Peter Preston.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/26/financial-time...

dtfon Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

2010 macbook, Chrome user. Things are generally slow, but felt like they got a bit snappier after the High Sierra upgrade. I tried FF57 but for me it feels a bit slower than Chrome on this older device.

dtfon A pub in North Yorkshire has won TripAdvisor’s Travellers’ Choice Awards

The Trip [1] is a worthwhile TV comedy series, wherein the protagonists visit a number of these haute cuisine pubs-in-the-middle-of-nowhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trip_(2010_TV_series)