Hacker News Reader

kriswon Linux grabs its single biggest win

The article is going on about how it's unimaginable to be running Windows in that environment, but I recall a few instances of military vessels running Windows in previous years/decades. Some report of US submarine(s) being dead in the water whenever NT crashes, a cruiser losing propulsion due to Windows crash, etc. I think running Windows on subs is not that uncommon.

kriswon What SimpleGeo could have been

This is disappointing. We have a webapp and (small) GPU datacenter that can extract tens of billions of polygons per day from remote sensing imagery (gis.incogna.com). I felt quite happy to see SimpleGeo working on a decentralized approach to the storage component.

kriswon What SimpleGeo could have been

I seem to remember that they were using a customized version of Cassandra to store the geodata

kriswon Urban Airship: Postgres to NoSQL and back

It's fascinating to read another company having evaluated NoSQL and come to an identical conclusion as we did internally.

I love the idea of NoSQL, but Cassandra was horrible (just look their source code or Thrift) and Mongo lost data. I guess 40 years of relational databases isn't so easy to replace.

kriswon Modern GPU: a collection of well-written GPGPU programming tutorials

If you want an "easy" way get into GPU development, AMD recently launched an interesting (open source) project that transparently compiles JVM bytecode into OpenCL: http://blogs.amd.com/developer/2011/09/14/i-dont-always-writ...

Definitely the easiest way I've seen to begin mucking around with GPU development.

kriswon Google Calendar Redesign: It's Goddamn Terrible

Click the gear (top right), then click "Use the classic look"

kriswon Google Search By Image

I compared/contrasted TinEye against Google CBIR for a bunch of images (I use TinEye a lot) and I have to say TinEye looks better than Google CBIR so far. TinEye has less "zero results" and more search results overall, I get the feeling TinEye deals with "Photoshopped images" better somehow.

kriswon Google Search By Image

Either way, hopefully they've improved it - I was never able to get Goggles to work very well at all (versus TinEye).

kriswon How Perceptual Hashes Work

What a fascinating topic, it's too bad that Gazopa (mentioned at the end of the article) just announced that they're shutting down their CBIR service:

http://gazopablog.blogspot.com/2011/05/shut-down-notice-from...