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smortazon Quincy Jones has died

my favorite story about quincy is that at as a 22 year old he was selected as the music arranger for dizzy gillespie’s band, and they all went to iran and gave a series of concerts. around 1954. RIP.

smortazon Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?

Bach is the best proof we have that advanced aliens visited earth and took human shape :). like in that episode of star trek, The Traveler.

and based on the complexity of Fugues he was probably the world’s best multi-threaded programmer too :).

smortazon How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

not directly relevant, but was riding my motorcycle in the boonies, and lost the phone which was on the handlebar (bumpy rocky path).

Looked for it several times on the path with no luck. Then I remembered my old iPhone was in the backpack. Did a Find my phone on the backup phone and it showed exactly where it had lost touch with the primary phone. This is all without cell or Wi-Fi service. Saved me a $1000.

smortazon Google Maps has become an eyesore

speaking of monetization, i’d happily pay a $10 monthly fee for these features as a biker:

- weather along route

Google knows the weather, it knows the route… Just add a layer! better yet suggest a reroute. i pay for a separate app for this currently.

- motorcycle friendly features

bigger buttons for usage with gloves; selection of straight, curvy, unpaved etc roads; right now it’s just Highway or non Highway

- ability to create a group and show their live locations on the map.

Something better than WhatsApp live location. The current approach that Google maps uses is cumbersome and non-intuitive. also if a route is updated, an option to update everyone else’s shared route.

- local info, POI, etc

you know my location and interests, tell me some interesting stuff over Bluetooth about the city or POI’s i’m passing by.

smortazon Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions

seems to be fast and accurate. thx will use.

smortazon Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI

yes definitely home page. it’s the first thing i looked for, didn’t immediately see, hit the back button.

i would also consider a trial pic for free tied to email.

smortazon Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

nice! is this in reference to composer javad maroofy?!

smortazon Legit Startups – AI Generated Startup Websites

brilliant! many chuckles. i hope people try it out.

smortazon Show HN: I made a new AI colorizer

tested on a few pics. excellent colorization. pls provide patreon etc link so the site stays up! thxxx

smortazon Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?

definitely. i used to run the visual studio / vs code teams for python, R, nodejs, jupyter etc at microsoft. working closely with and hiring from the os community was both delightful and a priority for me. several key employees were hired that way.

smortazon Limitations of DALL-E

:). i see seemingly random people keep posting their experiments with it. i guess they’re all in the inner circle or something

smortazon Limitations of DALL-E

thx will try!

smortazon Limitations of DALL-E

is there a hosted version of dall-e that people can play with? free or paid.

thanks!

smortazon Apple introduces new version of iMovie featuring Storyboards and Magic Movie

yes it’s quite bizarre that key functionalities are split between the built in Editor and iMovie. almost all videos have to be done using both. doing vertical videos + text is very awkward.

smortazon Tarrare

tarare is also the name of an opera by antonio salieri (of the amadeus movie fame) that takes place, of all places, in the hormoz island of the persian gulf…

smortazon Spiders are much smarter than you think

they are! once i found a baby spider in the jacuzzi and just let it stay there out of laziness. it set up shop in one of the water jet holes. it gradually grew and started catching the real enemy, the mosquitoes.

as a “thank you”, once every couple of days i’d catch a fly and feed it to him. i’d tap the electric fly swatter on the jacuzzi wall to drop the fly. this tapping sound quickly became sort of a pavlovian affair. as soon as i’d tap the fly swatter, he would rush out of the hole and grab its treat!

here’s the video

https://share.icloud.com/photos/0SkC9zuEe9JKh4t2M4DEz2A1w

smortazon Paint.NET 4.3 is now available

love paint.net. so many advanced features for a “basic” app. but why is rotating still unintuitive? is there a trick that i’ve missed or using the layers menu still the way?

smortazon Turing Award goes to Aho and Ullman

thank you aho & ullman. your dragon book got me hooked & started a 40 year career in compilers/languages. first job, an algol68 compiler on burroughs hw back in the middle ages.

smortazon I found an obscure political joke in the scan of a 1971 IBM logic block manual

Definitely. The OS, HW and Extended Algol had some nice features that were ahead of their time. I haven’t kept up, but their mainframes were very popular with banks etc.

smortazon I found an obscure political joke in the scan of a 1971 IBM logic block manual

The Burroughs OS (“Master Control Program”) in the 70s had a routine from which all other processes were started. Its name was MotherForker(). It was eventually renamed when HR found out.

smortazon Trapped in Iran: My Summer as a Guest of the Revolutionary Guards

Hah. Came to post the same video :). He didn’t actually visit a lot of the “beautiful” parts of the country, but it does paint a good picture of the peoples’ attitudes (even in really harsh economic times under a brutal regime)

smortazon Why We Terminated Our Partnership with Microsoft

Related: this guy rode through iran on 90cc bike and talks about his experience:

https://youtu.be/_2LEgowbzSc

smortazon JupyterHub 1.0

Congrats to the team! This is a major productivity milestone for teams using Jupyter.

smortazon VS Code Remote Development

Check out Python remote support as well which was announced today at PyCon:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/remote-python-developm...

smortazon 5,000 Pages of Verdi’s Drafts, Long Hidden, Will Be Made Public

and chopin. several of his most beloved works were to be bruned. if i had a time machine, my 1st stop would be paris, 1840, with pills for tuberculosis.

smortazon Show HN: TabNine, an autocompleter for all languages

Congrats! Out of curiosity, is this fundamentally different/better than the one in vscode? Nice to see it's multi-lingual.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualSt...

smortazon Neuron, a new VS Code extension for data science

See my note elsewhere in the thread. This was summer student project. Not sure why the blog was posted so late...

smortazon Neuron, a new VS Code extension for data science

FYI - This was one of the two Cambridge University projects that was done with our team last summer. I'm not sure why the report came out this late. Both were well done, especially considering the learning curve and duration.

The 1st one was the data science plugin for vscode mentioned in the blog. The other one which I haven't seen published yet was a C# kernel for Jupyter which can be found here along w a video: https://github.com/MohamedEihab/icsharp/tree/Roslyn_2

[disclaimer - work at microsoft]

smortazon Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

https://notebooks.azure.com (python, r, f#)

smortazon Show HN: Stay with founders in San Francisco

Fantastic idea. I've been doing this for various musicians & stage actors (free) for a few years and it's been very rewarding.