npgatech

This is amazing, thank you!

I am looking for startup advice for founders that don't want to build a billion-dollar company or need VC funding. How to efficiently target a local market? Or perhaps start a niche business that appeals to a small market.

Every time I see a startup advice book, article, Stanford lectures, whatever it may be - it is always shooting for becoming the next Uber or Airbnb - including this article.

Just like any technology, it took time to mature. You are hard pressed to find a brand new analog oscilloscopes today. WHY? Because, they provide enormous benefits even if the bandwidth was identical to analog counter parts. For one, you can't fricking store a waveform and look at it later (!!!)

>> "Digital tends to have more latency by its nature" - So...GPS satellites, atomic clocks, operation of a modern processor are full of latency that humans can detect? Human reaction time is in the order of 100ms. This statement makes zero sense. I honestly don't understand and I'd love you to explain what specific areas you think where this happens.

"I've played with analog audio and the immediacy of alterations and infinite resolution is palpable in comparison to their digital equivalents."

This kind of statements bother me because they are simply not true. You can have "tangible" controls (physical knobs and sliders) with digital signal processing back-end and I bet you that you can't tell the difference in a double blind test. This is the same bullshit that is thrown around by designers, artists and any kind of 'aficionados'- cliches of romanticization of the analog.

Oscilloscopes went full digital in 90's not because they were worse than analog counterparts. These are precision instruments that benefit from digital processing. Don't get me wrong - I own an analog oscilloscope for different reasons, i.e. I was fascinated by how things were done back in the day which I believe is the central theme of this thread. These analog motion graphics machines are amazing - NOT because of 'infinite resolution' but the process of creating art: Oscillators, scan rates, amplification, etc.

Go to reddit please. I am seeing HN degrade day by day with jokes and puns.

Thanks for the laugh. That said, I am concerned that HN is becoming more and more like reddit. No offense, but the reason I come to HN is for serious informative discussion, not puns and jokes. I realize this is an asshole thing to say but I just had to let this out.

Fair point, but you are omitting the fact that brain itself (that invented the wheel) was evolved through biological means.

That said, evolutionary optimization is generally considered unreliable(convergence) and inefficient.

This article doesn't teach the most fundamental aspect of drawing, i.e. to internalize a 3-dimensional object and being able to express it on a 2d plane. In order to efficiently and quickly learn this, you need to be able to accurately draw basic 3D objects (such as a cube, cone, cylinder, etc.) from any viewpoint. You don't need to focus on perspective and foreshortening just yet, an isometric view is fine.

Now, glue these basic objects together and make something slightly more complex. If you can draw it from any viewpoint (not just orthographic views), you have successfully learned the most fundamental and crucial part of the art of drawing.

Ideas of chiaroscuro are simply the tools to express depth on a 2D plane. They are not to be learned until you can master the whole internalization part.

This bothers me so much. No one knows how to teach this well except for a few YouTubers and college professors. Check out Sycra's drawing tutorials on YT.

I totally applaud 1blue3brown's videos but for some reason, his approach leaves me more confused than ever. Long winded unnecessary visualizations, especially when animated, annoys me for a reason that I cannot explain.

Don't get me wrong, visualizations are powerful but I think I prefer static visualizations. Animations overload the visual system with "visual bloat", if you will.

Also, this video did not help me visualize higher dimensions. I prefer a simpler approach - just project down to 3 dimensions (or 4 if you add time at the risk of animating).

Processing, especially the javascript library is ready to go on HTML canvas.

Thanks to AMD, we are finally seeing the break from sub 4-core era that has dominated the mid segment of consumer grade processors.

I clearly remember in 2006 when QX6600 was introduced and we were complaining about the lack of support for software taking advantage of the extra cores. After 10 years, things have improved on the software side but we still don't have affordable sub-$300 6 or 8 core processors. Sure, single core performance has dramatically increased but the # of cores haven't scaled. Perhaps partly due to the thermal challenges, but more so due to the lack of competition from AMD.

I think we are back to good ol' days of Intel vs. AMD!

I like how you think. 2D ---> 3D ---> 2D. Nothing has changed and yet we feel the latter is more "comprehendible"!

I think this is more of a vanity/luxury than actually TRULY useful thing. Many complex geometries are designed on CAD - from Airplane assemblies to intricate VSLI circuits.

Physical model is nice...but its utility is not justified for the expense of 3D printing.

Probably in industrial design and architecture. I don't come across a 3D graph where I go "Gee! I wish I had a physical model. I just can't understand this thing".

Don't get me wrong, it is nice. But I am debating how much better?

Is it that much more "enlightening" to 3D print vs just rotate the model on a computer screen? I can rotate a rendered model and get a pretty solid idea of the shape. I don't have to hold a physical model.

I find it the opposite. The syntax is the most intuitive of all plotting applications.

Layers are as follows [1]

1. Data

2. Aesthetic mappings

3. Statistical transformation (stat)

4. Geometric object (geom)

5. Position adjustment

Once you get a hang of this, it becomes easy to create new plots purely from the understanding of the layers. In matplotlib or even in Seaborn, I find myself constantly Googling for examples.

ggplot2 is the most beautiful thing to happen in visualization space!

[1] Wickham, Hadley, and Carson Sievert. "4.4.1 Layers." Ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Dordrecht: Springer, 2016. N. pag. Print.

Oh wow, thanks. I feel like Apple is a step behind in pretty much all things AI.

How so? Google developed a server class TPU for Datacenters. Apple is trying to build on-device low powered custom chip.

Why hasn't anyone press charges? Where is FBI on this? Everyone of these pieces of shits need to be deported back to Turkey.

Does anyone know what font is used in the main code in the following image?

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/corkami/pics/master/binary...

I think it would be amazing if Adobe incorporated some of these projects (Neural Style, etc.) as part of their "Creative Cloud" offerings...actually compute it in the cloud and return the result back to Photoshop.

I think that's only going to change.

Here is a $560B company that uses new gTLD: https://abc.xyz/

More https://www.quora.com/Which-Companies-use-io-Domains

>> One bit of advice I highly recommend, let the availability of the domain name you want dictate your name. Nothing worse than coming up with a great name and discovering you can't buy the domain name you want.

This has changed. With the advent of generic TLDs, the breadth of available domain names have greatly increased. You can always add a suffix if company name is not available - XYZ.com is not available, try XYZ.tech. If not, try XYZtech.com, XYZ.io, etc..

> Society as a whole isn't so different, and Feynman is not a good guide to civilized, socially conscious behaviour. Remember the time he got someone seriously injured because he wanted to unmask a perpetual motion hoax? http://hoaxes.org/comments/papparticle2.html It might have been an innocent act on Feynman's part, but bear in mind that he was just trying to expose the guy for his own slightly arrogant satisfaction. Not a good look when that ends in serious injuries.

Interesting article, thanks for sharing. It seems like an accident accord the article? I wouldn't be so quick to draw conclusions about Feynman's character from some accident. He has done notorious things with the CIA!

I was just trying to make a point. It could have been anyone, not necessarily Feynman, that sought beauty in various dimensions...not just the tangible paint and materiality. This point of view says nothing about civilized society or not appreciating what Chuck Close did. What the OP did just adds to the beauty of it all, doesn't take anything away from whatever it is that you romanticized about, i.e. "in the labour, materiality and individual creativity." This kind of view point is regressive in my opinion.

Scott's TEDx presentation says otherwise[1] - he was pretty much against Chuck's allegations to the point where he did a tongue-in-cheek presentation.

> It's still obviously a Chuck Close filter that acts in a way that completely erases/ignores the materiality, labour, and individual creativity that Close put into his paintings.

I disagree. In no way does that ignore Chuck's materiality, labour and individual creativity. In fact, it sheds more light on the process (which is very procedural and art critics would argue it is very "mechanical"). There is a tremendous amount of creativity in figuring out, as the OP has done, the underlying algorithmic beauty of replicating Chuck's works. Your definition of creative endeavor (materiality, labour) is profoundly limiting and very "physical".

I feel the opposite - OP's algorithm is way more interesting than Chuck's "materiality" and "labour". I will resort to Feynman's clip on 'Beauty of Flowers'[2], which does a better job of explaining my point.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKndFPr4vWk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo

From the link:

> Chuck Close does not want his art to be trivialized. He will exercise his legal rights, even if your motives are good. If he knows about your project and does nothing, that will put him in a position where he cannot fight the next, even more egregious usage of his copyrighted images and use of his name.

This is the kind of behavior that shows nothing but weakness and lack of faith in his own art. You have just trivialized his works using something that is even more beautiful - the construction & logic behind his intricate mosaics.

I have just lost respect for him and his works.

> I’m going to beat around the bush and not mention the artist’s name that was the source of inspiration because I’ve found articles online claiming he does not want his name referenced in personal projects, so I’ll respect their wishes.

I find this really weird. His art is public, on display at public places and he wishes not to be mentioned in public discussion?

Here is the guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close

I think that is the problem - learning what you see is flawed and shouldn't be the first step. If you look at Vilppu's drawing manual, or take the Fundamentals of Drawing class at Watts Atelier, and countless credible university courses, what you'll find is opposite of "learning what you see". I can understand that drawing a cube, cone, cylinder is very boring but so is learning chords or music theory in practicing Guitar.

That said, if one doesn't want to take drawing seriously and just want to have fun (See conflicting Amazon reviews on Betty's book), Betty's book perhaps is entertaining. I just have a problem with its popularity and will probably lead people into delusion that somehow they have managed to conquer the drawing. Drawing is hard.

I also lose respect for authors that despite of knowing nothing about the field or making any attempts to study/understand, they have the audacity to publish their own version of "how the brain works". It bothers me.

Betty Edward's book is horrendously misleading to a serious artist. Her book rewards the user with false sense of skill - learn to draw what you see and not what you know. This is easy to do and she has garnered a tremendous support. Any serious artist who is seeking to truly learn how to draw must go through the fundamentals of construction and being able to draw the same thing from a different viewpoint/angle. Try that with Betty's book where one learns how to draw from a reference without understanding the structure. The reader gets to produce nice looking results, but they will miserably fail when asked to draw the same exact subject from a different angle. This indicates lack of fundamental understanding of how to transform 3D objects/scenes into 2D plane. One has to learn how to internalize the object and its structure before putting it down on paper. Betty's book also is riddled with pseudoscience and baseless claims of how the human brain works.

> "So I too love the idea that we don't need dark matter to explain all the gravitational effects we observe in the universe."

It is an attempt to explain. Just like an attempt to explain (prediction) of Higgs Boson. It was only true once we observed it via experimentation.

Falsification makes sense if the theory has been experimentally validated. You can't falsify something that has not been proven.

There is no one claiming String theory or the theory discussed here is true - no experimental evidence has been produced.