Hacker News Reader

manvsmachineon Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

From what you've mentioned, I'm focusing on Go and GraphQL professionally (I'm a backend engineer). Flutter will definitely get looked at. Something I'd add if you also spend time in backends is infra - choose a system (probably AWS, GCP, or Azure in that order) and a infrastructure-as-code middleware for them (e.g, Terraform). More and more these days, the provider is now part of the stack.

manvsmachineon Ask HN: Cheap but decent quality Android smartphone?

Moto G4 or G5 (when the 5 comes out). The Moto G pretty much invented the category of inexpensive, solid performing phones with a non-tampered-with Android experience.

manvsmachineon Ask HN: What real-world apps are based on less popular disciplines of CS?

I figured he was trying to find out real-world problems that actually demand the use of "cutting-edge" tech and practices.

manvsmachineon Ask HN: What real-world apps are based on less popular disciplines of CS?

Honestly, there are far to many to even list. I think part of the issue may just be that not every application is an 'app' - computing is increasingly intertwined with physical applications. Here are a few consumer-focused 'emerging tech' applications off the top of my head:

Graphics / CV: VR Gaming (Oculus, HTC Vive, etc), self-driving vehicles, computational photography (Lytro)

HCI: Leap, Kinect, VR Gaming again

Architecture / performance / networking / databases are tools, not applications in and of themselves - find a problem that demands extremely high performing systems, and there will be work done in those areas. Example: the PX 2 system for self-driving racecars that Nvidia announced a few days ago at GTC hits six of your bullets points by itself (architecture, performance, computer vision, networking, parallel systems, computational science).

manvsmachineon Ask HN: Save developer time by automating setup?

If you're just looking to manage your personal environment, probably Vagrant + Chef. If we're talking about for a team or organization, a former co-worker of mine wrote a nifty tool called Boxen [http://boxen.github.com] that's definitely worth checking out.

manvsmachineon Postgres on the GPU

I'm not a miner, so correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems like a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Tesla cards (and the servers designed around them) are intended for specific use cases: mission-critical enterprise solutions and scientific HPC. As a result, they run slower processor and memory speeds in comparison to nVidia's own consumer products, use ECC memory, and are optimized for double-precision over single-precision performance. Mining with a Tesla is like gaming with a Quadro card.

manvsmachineon Absolute Beginner's Guide to Bit Shifting

I first learned about bit-shifting when I took DIP / Computer Vision as an undergrad. All the assignments were done as plugins for ImageJ, which is apparently widely used in the scientific community (or so the course claimed). ImageJ stores the pixel values for images as bytes, ints, or longs (depending on the color-depth), so to get the individual component values from a 32-bit RGBA image (8 bits per channel), you would do something like this:

int pixel = image.get(x, y);

int alphaVal (pixel & 0xFF000000) >> 24;

int redVal = (pixel & 0x00FF0000) >> 16;

int greenVal = (pixel & 0x0000FF00) >> 8;

int blueVal = (pixel & 0x000000FF);

That's just one example w/ one piece of software, but I know similar approaches are often used within the world of imaging / graphics. Maybe networking? Seem like it would correlate well to IP address operations.

manvsmachineon CIA to software vendors: A revolution is coming

That's the one.

manvsmachineon CIA to software vendors: A revolution is coming

I'm guessing that that's the reporter's fault. The quote seems to referring to AWS, which they've probably never heard of, leading them to make a uninformed guess as to its meaning. Just another case of general media reporters covering stories they're not qualified for.

manvsmachineon Jeremy Lin's Success and The System

One thing I love about Lin's story is that it's making people realize that today's "industry experts" still don't perfectly place talent where it needs to be, even in an industry as heavily scouted and recruited as pro sports.

manvsmachineon Show HN: Themes for Bootstrap

focusing more on design choices and principles rather than on CSS technicalities

I'd suggest using it specifically for this reason - that is, unless there is another framework that does an equally good job of getting out of one's way as Bootstrap. That said, it definitely makes sense to try to limit its use to a small subset for your tutorials.

manvsmachineon Why Chef?

I'm guessing that 'receipts' was meant to be 'recipes'.

manvsmachineon Lulz Sec Revealed??

IIRC, this is old and has already been debunked.

manvsmachineon Xen has been fully integrated into Linux kernel 3.0

Xen is still widely used. IIRC Xen provides the virtualization layer for AWS, and it is used by some pretty large hosting providers (Linode comes to mind). It also is packaged into a number of commercial commercial offerings. Oracle's VM solution is really just Xen running on Red Hat with some optimizations for their platform stack, same with Citrix. Clearly those two implementations alone is going to be a decently-sized install base.

I don't know how much KVM is used in the wild, but it has been crowned the "official" hypervisor for RHEL and Ubuntu, so I would guess that it it's been steadily gaining steam w/ the OSS crowd.

manvsmachineon A $4.8M model airport with computer controlled vehicles

The funny thing is that, while my first reaction was "that's really cool", my immediate next thought was that it would have been much cooler using augmented reality instead of figurines and models. I wonder how much longer there is going to be demand for physical proofs of concept like these.

manvsmachineon Michigan Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops

In the article, it said that the device used could extract data regardless of whether the phone was password-protected or not. Looks like it's time to start encrypting our cellphone data as well.

manvsmachineon A Cultural Thing: Why More Minority Women Aren’t In Tech

There factor of risk aversion exists, but I'd argue not any more so for women than for men of the same racial groups. This is because the risk really isn't financial - these days everyone knows that there's tons of money to be made in tech. The risk is in prestige - doctors often become known figures in their communities in a way that engineers rarely do. Believe me, this can be a huge factor for people who grew up noticing that they were treated "differently" - minorities, immigrants, women, etc. If you are doing something awesome with your life, you want people to know about it; it can often mean the difference between being shown respect and not.

In response to Shamiq, this could be why most of the "underrepresented minorities" you see in tech are actually women; arguably, they have less to prove.

manvsmachineon Ask HN: Hacker career change

What kind of engineer are you? You mention having foundations in C and Matlab; is this something that you would be interested in building on or do you want to leave the engineering world completely? I spent a lot of time hanging around the Image Processing / Computer Vision lab during university and pretty much everything they did was in Matlab and C / C++ (ImageMagick and OpenCV).

manvsmachineon The Broken U.S. Jobs Factory: Too Many Athletes, Too Few Scientists?

Elite athletes are valuable only because they are scarce.

That statement is vacuous in regards to the argument he's trying to make. Anyone who is elite at what they do is scarce, regardless of occupation; that's essentially the meaning of being elite. What sets athletes apart is the degree to which society rewards that eliteness.

manvsmachineon Ask HN: I've read JS Definitive Guide, Good Parts. What next?

raniskeet has a good point; if you've read and really understand the content of both of those, there's not too much that you'll learn from just reading more books. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you (read The Good Parts, started the Def Guide), and my next step is not to read about Javascript, but to read Javascript. Pick a codebase of something you use or want to start using and learn how it ticks.

manvsmachineon Carmack: Direct3D is now better than OpenGL

I would think that the PS3 supports more than just ES, as Unigine has been offering their engine for use on the console, and their benchmarks using said engine use the latest OpenGL 4 features like HW tesselation (http://unigine.com).

manvsmachineon Chromium Browser Gets A New Logo

I do like the new look, but I wish that they kept the illusion of reflectivity a little bit. I know the matte look is in right now, but the name of the browser is Chrome. They could easily imply simulate a reflective surface using different matte monochromatic shades of the blue.

manvsmachineon Ask HN : Is there an HN for graphic designers (web but mostly print)?

No personal experience there, but I've heard a lot of good things about Forrst (http://forrst.com). As far as blogs go, Smashing Magazine (http://smashingmagazine.com), A List Apart (http://alistapart.com), and Think Vitamin (http://thinkvitamin.com) come to mind.

manvsmachineon Ask HN: What is the best computer for $1100? 13in MacBook Pro or...

"Fullscreen video" isn't saying much. Sure, my 5 year old AMD64 desktop can play fullscreen video. Can it play fullscreen 1080p h.264 / HD Flash (remember, 5 year old video card == no HW acceleration) without dropping frames or turning into a space heater? Not so much.

manvsmachineon Ask HN: What is the best computer for $1100? 13in MacBook Pro or...

There are a lot of good laptops in that price range these days. The deciding factor is probably going to be non-technical : OS preference, style / design, customer service. That said, here are the ones I've been looking at:

MBP 13": Yeah, it's really 1199, but it's worth the extra cash if you want OSX (and you'll get it for less if you can claim student status). You already have a MBP, so this is an obvious choice. Added bonus: they just got a refresh, so you're looking at shiny new tech.

HP Envy 14: The route to take if you are in love with the MBP's style / build quality, but don't really care for / need OSX. Specs stack up pretty well against the MBP 13, even considering the refresh (Thunderbolt notwithstanding). Currently my personal frontrunner since I use Ubuntu as my primary OS.

Lenovo Thinkpad T410: The anti-Mac. Batman's Tumbler to Bruce Wayne's Lamborghini. Not much else to say about it; Thinkpads' reputation is easily as legendary as that of MBP's when it comes to performance and indestructibility.

Honorable mentions - Macbook Air / Lenovo IdeaPad U260 : If you're into the ultra-thin-and-light thing, these are the two to look into.

Side note: if you decide on any route other than the MBP, you'd be wise to wait a little before purchasing. Other manu's have been waiting to put out refreshes of their lines as well due to the Sandy Bridge fiasco. For all we know, Apple might not be the only one with LightPeak / Thunderbolt / whatevertheycallit for long.

manvsmachineon Solving The Hacker News Problem

Heh, I'm 26 and I've started calling myself old.

manvsmachineon Poll: Which S/N improvements do you think would most improve HN?

I like the idea of hiding scores, with one caveat: Ask HN. Those posts often end up taking on a StackExchange-like manner in which upvoting for agreement makes sense and you really do want to know which responses got the most votes.

manvsmachineon Poll: Which S/N improvements do you think would most improve HN?

During the discussion that sparked the creation of this poll, I too suggested weighting upvotes by the karma of the upvoter. Thinking about it further, I still like the idea, but it would have to be done properly or it could be easily gamed. Example: a small group with relatively low karma could simply upvote every post and comment made by others within that group (a complete directed graph of upvoting). It would not take a particularly large group to be able to artificially inflate its karma at a greater than linear rate.

The quick (and probably flawed) solution I came up with was to have a tiered base amount that is determined by the karma percentile of the upvoter (eg, 75th percentile might get you an additional 2 points, 25-75 1 extra). Furthermore, there is an additional potential bonus based on the karma delta between voter and votee (ie, upvotes from top HN'ers are more valuable to newbs than to other top HN'ers). As an example, we'll say that we add one point for every 25% tier between the voter and votee (no bonus if they are the same). Using this example, a top-tier vote would be worth 5 points to a newb but 3 to a veteran.

This would allow high-quality posters with more recent accounts to quickly gain the necessary karma for voting, polls, etc without causing such massive karma inflation on the high end.

manvsmachineon Show HN: I made an Android app that gives you an extra phone number to give out

As someone who also uses GV as a "real" number, I love the option to flush your number and get a new one. It's like the voice equivalent of "cleaning house" on social networking sites.

manvsmachineon OpenGL in JAVA - step by step tutorial

http://duriansoftware.com/joe/An-intro-to-modern-OpenGL.-Tab...