Hacker News Reader

jclon Why Nearly Every Film Ends by Saying It’s Fiction

I've assumed the same is true of the "views expressed on this DVD do not necessarily reflect those of (studio)" unskippable disclaimer that is on every DVD these days. But I'm still curious what specific event motivated it.

jclon The Macaroni in ‘Yankee Doodle’ Is Not What You Think

For those unaware, "hipster" turns out to be an excellent analogue to "macaroni"... In the 1940s and 50s the term had positive connotations as someone fashionable or in-the-know, but it has since come to be a term of ridicule.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc...

jclon Drawing Holograms by Hand (2003)

It might be better to use the "Scratch Holograms" link at the top of that paper, as it has better exposition and a video. :)

http://amasci.com/amateur/holo1.html

jclon Metropolis Algorithm and Bayesian posterior sampling

Actually, the Renderman denoiser is based on work from Disney Research.

https://renderman.pixar.com/view/denoiser

PCA would be one way to do that. This recent paper suggests that they may be decomposing the samples mostly by path type, though:

https://www.disneyresearch.com/publication/pathspace-decompo...

jclon Metropolis Algorithm and Bayesian posterior sampling

I found this tutorial was a good overview for both the Metropolis algorithm and for Metropolis Light Transport:

https://facweb.cs.byu.edu/graphics/publications/metropolisTu...

jclon Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers

FWIW, it's also the only model available with a Kensington lock slot and an Ethernet port.

jclon A free/open computer on a card that you swap in and out of a 3D printed laptop

A step closer to the Sandbenders computer from William Gibson's "Idoru":

...he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there... And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone... And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions.

jclon Cyclone Scheme – Cheney on the MTA with Native Threads

I thought this might have had something to do with the Cyclone safety-oriented C dialect, but apparently the similar name is coincidental.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_(programming_language)

jclon Augmented Urban Reality

FWIW, William Gibson's Spook Country has a protagonist who researches virtual geotagged art exhibits.

jclon How Trees Calm Us Down

Some of the walks took place in June, whereas others took place in January; most people didn’t particularly enjoy trudging through the harsh Michigan winter, but their scores jumped just as much as in the summer trials.

I found this the most interesting point in the article. I would have assumed that any psychological effect of viewing trees would be largely due to their greenness, since that is their dominant visual aspect. But, assuming a largely deciduous environment, naked trees in winter would seem to have the same effect. So the effect must be stimulated by something deeper than just raw color.

jclon Is the Great Attractor a Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?

For some reason, I thought this was going to be about the Lorenz Attractor...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lorenz_attractor_yb....

jclon Is there a reason Hillary Clinton's logo has hidden notches?

I guess it depends on your definition of "solution" and "MSAA moral equivalent". What you're essentially asking is, "Is there a way to approximate the combined contributions of overlapping polygons to a set of pixels without sampling the exact color at multiple points per pixel?"

One approach would be to avoid sampling at all, by using boolean geometric operations to find the exact shapes of visible polygons within a pixel, then using their color and areas to calculate their combined contributions. I expect the calculation involved will be impractical relative to multisampling, though.

Another approach would be sample exactly once per pixel or, equivalently, render the polygons without antialiasing. Naturally, that would eliminate the show-through of hidden geometry at the expense of the accuracy of pixels around polygon edges. You might then be able to approximate the antialiased values by a post-processing filter, maybe guided by the presence of edges, although doing so will introduce its own set of artifacts.

And if you consider "one sample per pixel" to be a budget over the entire image, you could sample the polygons more densely near polygon edges and more sparsely elsewhere, using nearby samples to approximate the values of pixels with no samples.

jclon [dead]

FWIW, SFO uses a private contractor to conduct security in lieu of TSA. I've noticed that they do not have the "TSA" shoulder marks on their uniforms that actual TSA have at other airports. Presumably SFO hired them because they were better than TSA in some respect, if that tells you anything. :)

It looks like several airports that were contracting them have since switched to another contractor, though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_Aviation_Security#For...

jclon This is not a place of honor

It's actually not that dissimilar from the plot of "Alien". Or "Prometheus". Or "At the Mountains of Madness".

jclon Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

...which, for what it's worth, is an Electron app. :)

jclon The Descriptor Protocol and Python Black Magic

It is linked in the second update at the bottom of the article:

https://bugs.python.org/issue23702

jclon Uber says it gave U.S. agencies data on more than 12M users

Per the article, the 12 million records were disclosed to "regulators", not law enforcement. From "transparencyreport.uber.com", it looks like the primary consumers were California (~5M) and NYC (~3M), followed by various other cities, states, and airports.

jclon The Most Popular Cars in American Cities

One thing that I didn't know prior to moving to California is that if your car meets certain specifications, it gets a sticker that allows you to drive in diamond lanes (carpool lanes), regardless of the number of passengers. I imagine that this, combined with foreign brands' early investment in hybrids, is a factor in the popularity of foreign brands in California, at least.

jclon Save Netflix

I think the author's point is that the Netflix of today was only able to afford proper licensing and DRM for digital content because they made so much money mailing around discs, against strong objection from the content providers. And if someone wanted to bootstrap a new video distribution service today on a digital platform, EME would give the content providers the power to put an end to it.

jclon Tim Cook responded to this young illustrator's open letter

If you want to learn to draw from life, the biggest hurdle is learning to interpret visual signals directly -- what artists refer to as "learning to see". Your brain naturally wants to turn visual input (edge, color, pattern) into higher-level concepts ("house", "nose", "cat", etc.), which is wonderful for general survival but unhelpful when this interpretive step inserts itself in the path from your eyes to your pencil.

However, there are a variety of exercises you can do to learn to see low-level visual input over higher-level interpretations, like copying images upside-down, following a visual edge with both eye and pencil, using a viewfinder or grid to narrow attention, measuring angles/distances between landmarks, moving attention to "negative space", etc.

You can find these kinds of exercises in most life drawing books. I particularly like "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", as it's structured for independent study, it has a focus on quickly producing results for absolute novices, and it has a scientific bent -- although anything it says about physical neurological structure should be taken with a grain of salt.

jclon Winning a competition predicts dishonest behavior

The paper isn't explicit about it, but I'm guessing "...among Ivy League college students" is an implicit part of the title.

Drawing from a population that has spent most of their lives competing and winning may skew the results somewhat, relative to other populations...

jclon Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

If anyone is interested in how the game's beautiful lighting works, Ignacio Castaño wrote several articles about his work on it:

http://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/tag/witness/

jclon Colorizing black and white photos with deep learning

Yeah, I got the same impression. The mapping it seems to have discovered is:

  vegetation texture -> greenish
  sky texture -> blueish
  everything else -> brownish

...which is not a bad set of defaults for most photos.

jclon Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download

Here's the original blog post, for anyone who was interested in reading it after Springer decided to reinstate its $30-per-chapter charge:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

(While I know they charge like this for most of their e-books, this particular example is embarrassing.)

jclon APT tilting train: A laughing stock that changed the world

Use of "bug" to mean "defect" goes back a lot further than the computer age:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bug&allowed_in_fram...

At the time of Grace Hopper, the term was used in engineering contexts to refer to defects in general, quite unrelated to insects. Per your link, that's why she wrote "first actual case of a bug being found" -- it was amusing and unusual to find a bug (defect) caused by a bug (insect). If this were not the case, there would be no need to use the words "first" or "actual", or even note the event.

jclon Ways to Avoid Complexity in Modern C++ [pdf]

Presumably, C interop is the cause of C++'s problems because it was the impetus for carrying forward all of C's warts into C++. And it is the solution because it allows you to put C++ code behind a C-compatible interface so that you can use it from a language that isn't C++.

jclon Adobe Animate CC, a New Era for Flash Professional

I did not vote you down, but your comment doesn't really add much. It's a common sentiment that could have been posted on any article about Flash.

And it makes even less sense on this particular article, since, if you read between the lines, Adobe is acknowledging that Flash is a tainted brand and that SWF is on its way out.

jclon WhatsApp is blocking Telegram links

Assuming the source code posted in the article is the only code doing the blocking, it's only blocking links where a domain or subdomain is "telegram", although the regex could easily be altered to block other links, too.

jclon Visual Studio Code is now open source

For what it's worth, .NET was chosen at the peak of the .com boom, when Microsoft was trying to hide the fact that they were late to the party -- and COM was already taken. :)

jclon Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

I think this may be the most important thing in the article. If the conspirators really were communicating via in-game ephemera, the communication probably wasn't encrypted at all. If so, the hurdle that the security forces faced is not that they couldn't access the communication, but that they couldn't interpret it.

And that just shows how little a mandatory backdoor policy would help: being able to read something doesn't mean you can understand it. It's always possible for someone to come up with a communication scheme that you didn't anticipate or can't interpret, and you can't legislate away that capability.

So a backdoor policy doesn't trade privacy for safety -- instead it trades privacy for a chance at safety, and pretty much just safety from careless, unprepared attackers.