Hacker News Reader

retroencabulatoon Fourier Image Filtering

How often are frequency-domain tools actually used on perfectly periodic signals?

The mathematics assumes the sample is of a (bandlimited) periodic signal, but so what? What is of interest here is the power spectrum of the sample.

retroencabulatoon Time exchange rate

Cute, but there are a lot of situations where this breaks down. It assumes that a programmer's efficiency is independent of a program's efficiency.

If I have to wait hours for a job to complete that could be completed in moments with a bit of extra work, there certainly is value in working on the optimisation.

retroencabulatoon Show HN: Pi Approximation using Monte Carlo

No, you missed the point. In problems with a very large sample space, quasi-MC methods are invaluable. They converge faster and can be shown to approximately have the benefits of traditional MC methods.

retroencabulatoon Navdy: HUD for your car

I can't speak for this product, but the Boeing HUDs do exactly this: to see the display clearly you need to focus at infinity. That is why they are so useful.

retroencabulatoon DEFCON – The Full Documentary

I turned off after they spent five minutes talking about driving to DEFCON. Eh.

retroencabulatoon Show HN: A 16-bit Forth machine written in VHDL

The point is there may be an additional, secret, logic block which allows malicious access to the flops.

retroencabulatoon Backtracker: Radar sixth sense for cyclists

Technology is good, the human interface sucks.

How about a Google Glass-esque helmet indicator?

retroencabulatoon William Shatner reviews Facebook Mentions

Even Facebook events now seem tacky for anything other than massive events in my social circles.

retroencabulatoon MacBook Air Stickers

retroencabulatoon Large Round of Layoffs Expected at Microsoft

Is it really that black and white to compare the size of engineering teams 20 years apart?

retroencabulatoon Show HN: Papa Parse 3

I will probably receive flack for this, but am I the only one that thinks it is a little bizarre this much branding and visual design has gone into a CSV parser?

retroencabulatoon Show HN: Papa Parse 3

Why?

retroencabulatoon Australian Government Repeals It's Carbon Tax Scheme

A damn shame. ANU just published a study finding the carbon price was effective at curbing emissions too [1]. Oh well...

[1] https://ccep.crawford.anu.edu.au/publication/ccep-working-pa...

retroencabulatoon People Hate Bankers Because People Are Ignorant

"People shouldn't hate bankers because it is their fault they accept misleading information."

retroencabulatoon Turning College Into a No-Thought Zone

Reminds me of the documentary: Berkeley in the 60s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEySwyM2ZQ0

retroencabulatoon The new sign on French menus

I had no idea what it meant until the article described it. I can't unsee the pot now, but I still think it is confusing.

retroencabulatoon Software used to count Australian Senate votes is a “trade secret”

Or, as they said, the software has commercial value:

http://www.aec.gov.au/about_aec/AEC_Services/Fee_for_service...

retroencabulatoon Software used to count Australian Senate votes is a “trade secret”

In their defence, in Section 15 of the FOI rejection letter, they mention the software is used for several fee-for-service industrial elections.

retroencabulatoon Software used to count Australian Senate votes is a “trade secret”

Australian elections ARE pen and paper.

The ballots are entered (by hand AFAIK) into the AEC's central system to compute the complex preference flows. Realistically, the algorithm isn't that complicated, and the ABC does a good job at guestimating it [1]. This is why it is so surprising they refuse to release it, even after the Senate passed a motion demanding its release [2].

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/results/sen...

[2] http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/550114/electoral_com...

retroencabulatoon Reverse Engineering Vendor Firmware [video]

Eh, I do similar work, but find his whining tone intolerable.

retroencabulatoon Google Drive Found Leaking Private Data

Wow, don't read the comments on that blog.

retroencabulatoon Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B

Found it: http://cloneforest.com/products/marketplace_script_for_templ...

retroencabulatoon Google Co-Founders on Healthcare: “Thanks, But No Thanks”

Misleading title. It should be "Google Co-Founders on being a health company"

retroencabulatoon Abnormal Brain Structure In Youth Who Commit Homicide

I love commenting on neuroimage research after reading the fantastic:

"Ten ironic rules for non-statistical reviewers." Neuroimage 61.4 http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Ten%20ironic%20rules%20fo...

retroencabulatoon The Developer's Dystopian Future

I love HN. In response to a complaint about learning new frameworks, you suggest three other alternatives.

retroencabulatoon Detecting login state for almost any website on the internet

The linked W3C mailing list[1] provides some interesting discussion, as well as a blog post from Jan outlining this attack[2].

The conclusion: security benefits of CSP outweigh cons.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webappsec/2014Feb...

[2] http://homakov.blogspot.de/2014/01/using-content-security-po...

retroencabulatoon Daskeyboard 4 Professional

What makes it the ultimate geek keyboard, other than the name? I love my TKL, but I would never buy something without a Function row.

retroencabulatoon Bare Metal Assembly Raspberry Pi Starfox Tribute

I'm impressed first year students can write such clean assembly. Also that they can write both driver code and a higher level rasterizer.

retroencabulatoon Will 7nm And 5nm Really Happen?

No way is 28nm cheaper than 32nm per chip. Even though the die size shrinks, the process is much more expensive.

Also, s/waffles/wafers/