theoh

The scenario I'm talking about is not synthesising a RAW file from scratch, but being able to freely edit it and save the result back into a RAW file that looks "original". I don't think you've made any statements that indicate that doing that would be complex.

Again, this is not about faking a RAW file from scratch, just being able to edit it in place.

Interestingly, some major photo competitions require 'original' RAW files to be submitted along with processed jpegs. The idea is that they can check that the image hasn't been modified in a way that breaks the rules.

Of course, software people know that it would be tedious but technically straightforward to concoct a fake RAW file from another 'raw' format such as a PPM image. The stakes in these competitions can be quite high so it's a bit disconcerting that they rely on a presumption that converting RAW files to editable images is a one-way process.

Just the other day someone posted something here about defunctionalizing continuations. That's the way to go: whatever amount of state the server has to hold, you have to hold anyway, and clever defunctionalization will let you just hold that amount even with a continuation-based approach.

The paper is literally about doing away with the inversion of control.

The concept of continuations is well-established and they have their uses. They have been part of the landscape for years. They can be confusing, and that's impossible to separate from their power.

The inversion of control that this paper is talking about is the way an application running on a webserver typically gets called by the browser rather than the other way around. Continuation-based webservers reverse this inversion and create an illusion of continuity of control flow on the server side. The application is suspended when a page is sent to the browser and resumed (via a continuation) when the response arrives. So this is about permitting server-side applications to be written in a nicer style as far as control flow is concerned.

I think you are getting downvoted because your comment more or less says that you don't know much about the background, and haven't read and understood the paper, but are inclined to dismiss it anyway.

This comment is like a red rag to a bull for me, because why wouldn't some artists want a basic grasp of calculus?

Bear in mind that a secondary education, for most people, involves learning the basics of calculus. You might be thinking that all artists are bad at math or too stupid to grasp calculus. You might be thinking that there are no applications of calculus in art. I don't know. But given the role artists are supposed to play in society, it seems pretty reasonable to expect that some of them will have an interest in learning calculus to a high school level like a significant fraction of the non-specialist public.

A concrete example of this might be an artist who is interested in systems theory from an ecological perspective. Once you start talking about stocks and flows (of fish or minerals or greenhouse gases) then calculus and differential equations are really the next thing to tackle.

No, as the voiceover says, it was a much less powerful Class 46 (46009).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_46

I don't know the Observable folks personally, but I've been watching what they post on Twitter. It's not snobbery to say that the level of polish and sophistication present in what they put out (in terms of the reactive architecture and the graphic side of it) is second to none. Their product has got so much class that the idea that they would spend time on SEO is kind of incongruous, right?

See this article for an in-depth look at implementing these conversions: https://research.swtch.com/ftoa

That particular example is discussed here: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/02/nyregion/authors-seek-mus...

Apparently one had to have a publishing contract to be admitted. I'm not sure how elitist that actually worked out to be.

There are also membership-funded places like http://www.writersroom.org/

I know more about how this works in the arts, where the relevant term is "residency". Access to exclusive residencies is usually allocated on the basis of previous career success, and they are usually funded by endowments of some kind. It's an example of institutional support for artists, and the top residencies are extremely elitist. There are lots of humble ones too, though.

There was a proposed system back in the 90s which involved multiple decryption keys. https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/pubs/heraclitean-tr9...

To describe the article as an application of modern control theory is an exaggeration; these rules (proportional navigation and proportional pursuit) are extremely simple and ancient. It's difficult to imagine a time when humans didn't intuitively understand the law described in the paper as proportional pursuit, and the idea behind proportional navigation predates guided missiles by hundreds if not thousands of years.

It's a relief that the heavy mathematical prerequisites of optimal control theory aren't needed to understand what the birds do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_bearing,_decreasing_r...

Aeronautics is (still) an incredibly glamorous field, and fighter jets and aviation disasters are a stereotypical topic of fascination for male engineers. HN is all about the "cool", charismatic side of engineering, and it doesn't get much cooler than critiquing warplanes and analysing air disasters.

Geeking out about this kind of topic is routine for people with an interest in engineering. And let's be clear: it really is just a matter of geeking out, people getting a thrill out of playing at "appearing to really know their stuff".

You haven't taken into account the difference between mean solar time and apparent solar time. The system you describe is essentially the old local mean time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_mean_time.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4ngemodell https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettenlinie_(Mathematik)

NB, the line taken by the cables of a suspension bridge with a deck of uniform weight is a parabola. I think this is what causes the popular confusion.

Thanks for the characteristically rude HN assumption that I don't know what I'm talking about.

I know all about Chipperfield, at least to the extent of having seen him lecture about his work in Berlin. He was inspired by Dollgast's work http://www.prewettbizley.com/graham-bizley-blog/dollgast and to be honest I don't see the contradiction with what I said. Not everything Chipperfield did in the Neues Museum falls into the category of "restoration" but the parts that do absolutely follow this principle of discreet but identifiable replacement.

Chipperfield on Dollgast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfizDUjvomA&t=36m56s

See especially the bit at 38:30 where he talks about not confusing the original with the new (in archaeological reconstruction).

Here also is a reference to a 2013 book that says almost exactly what I said: https://books.google.ie/books?id=ddTZAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT366&dq=br...

Please don't further pollute the already toxic environment on HN by assuming the person you are talking to is incompetent, acting in bad faith, or knows less than you do.

The standard interpretation of this is something like the following:

If you replace an element (e.g. a brick) with a new brick, you should aim for it to blend in discreetly and convincingly with the existing structure BUT you should not try to conceal the fact that it is a repair (by distressing it, for example).

This is like the argument that comedians who make funny jokes about human nature must therefore have good insight into politics. Anyone who watches comedy knows that the ability to be funny doesn't equate to having a good analysis of the situation.

I think you are exaggerating the expertise of both men. Gates was successful, but that doesn't mean he had rock-solid knowledge of all aspects of business and technology. Pratchett wrote humorous fiction, but that doesn't make him an expert on sociology.

Pratchett's comment didn't require a lot of insight to come up with—it's just the (essentially reactionary) observation that publishing on the internet is a free-for-all. And Gates correctly observed that ranking systems like HITS (or PageRank) would recreate, online, the way information sources gain authority in the offline world.

The fake news problem has nothing to do with the web's openness—it thrives on FB. Offline, and independent of the web, the narrative Fox pushes is arguably very close to fake news as well. Neither Pratchett nor Gates displayed significant insight into the that kind of political problem.

Where did this title come from? I usually can't stand HN's fussing over titles but this one really seems tendentious.

This is an unsatisfactory discussion, because you are attacking straw men.

Samuelson was a genius and a once-in-a-generation thinker. I specifically avoided excluding the existence of such people who can take on the incumbents of the theoretical pantheon.

You at least concede that great thinkers are all more or less held in a certain level of esteem. It's precisely this pious, respectful attitude that makes unsympathetic critiques rare. I'm not saying that an academic world in which such critiques were commonplace would be better, or even possible. The conservatism and conventionality of the framework in which academic work takes place may well be intrinsic to the social function of the activity. The fact is that a vast amount of work is done which rehearses, builds on, applies, or seeks to recover value from the work of the 'masters'. Skepticism is not the word I would use to describe the way the literature is typically approached. Criticality is circumscribed by a sense of decorum — one must not be too critical of a thinker whose work so many others have engaged with. To be too critical would be arrogant, or at the very least it would indicate that one was in the wrong intellectual milieu.

I really am not aware of highly respected "unsympathetic" engagements in today's academia. Yes, there were high-profile disputes in the past between contemporaries — Einstein and Bergson, for example. But today refutations and dismissals don't seem to be considered appropriate. The overwhelming mood is one of appreciation of classic texts within small specialized interest groups. Rigorous refutations (as in Samuelson's work on Marx) really don't seem to happen very often at all. They almost seem like something rude.

That's all fine. I think you will agree, though, that engaging with Marx's writing, however critically, is not the same as offering an explicit correction to Marx's theories or putting them to the test. It's more of a case of "thinking with Marx". The tropes of Marx's thinking are kept alive somehow rather than dismissed — there is faith that Marx and the others had put their finger on something important and that their writing continues to be worth discussing.

An attempt to entirely refute Marx or Freud would not be taken seriously in academia — there's always some kind of affirmative stance in relation to the old theorists. Unless you are some kind of genius or enfant terrible.

I think you are essentially dismissing philosophy in general.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

"Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology."

I think Deleuze (who described some of his work as belonging to the genre of "generalized anti-Hegelianism", which I take to mean a kind of inversion of Hegel, i.e. a materialism) would just have laughed if you said his ideas were iffy. It's part and parcel of being on the radical cutting edge "producing concepts" in the philosophical tradition (participation in which necessitates acknowledging Hegel).

Is there a philosopher whose significant ideas were not steps into the unknown, moving beyond accepted thought? No philosophical idea worth considering is incontestable.

They might be seen as iffy because of the damage that has been done in the name of each of their theories. Marx obviously has a lot to answer for if you consider him responsible for everything that went wrong in the USSR; Freud's influence is probably as much bad as good, if you consider it as having brought a compelling but pseudoscientific method to bear on psychology. And so on.

It does sound anti-intellectual to dismiss all those thinkers as iffy, but I'd much rather retain the option of treating their views with skepticism than enrol in a PhD programme where it's implicit that all one can do is write footnotes on the work of these great men. (You seem to imply that — unless, that is, the student is a rare and impertinent genius who has the temerity to take them on.)

To be clear, though, the type of things Labour and Wait sells are selected based on criteria that have more to do with fashion than practicality or ecological sustainability. It is totally a hipster fetishization of a certain idealized time in the past.

Personally, I like that style a lot, but what they offer only covers a limited range of household needs.

https://www.independent.co.uk/property/interiors/back-to-bas...

Otherwild in Los Angeles has recently opened a department that sells zero-waste products. That seems to have a bit more of an environmental agenda, but it's still within this kind of fashion frame: https://otherwild.com/pages/about-otherwild-general

That Chimera was pretty nice, all right:

http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/projects/chimera-www

In a similar category, but using Gtk, was Ralph Levien's gzilla https://www.levien.com/gzilla/

Nothing but respect? The word "hobbyist" suggests otherwise.

This article seems a bit misguided in its dismissal of the significance of historical fact. The last paragraph seems to me to get unnecessarily snotty about somebody making a very precise best-guess reconstruction of a historical value/location. "Out-of-thin-air" values aren't something I had heard of but apparently that category has to do with circular reasoning—so it doesn't apply literally in this case. It's just a self-satisfied way of smearing someone else's good faith work.

He is referring to increasing economic inequality. This information inequality helps the rich get richer.