Hacker News Reader

wxson Model Your Users: Algorithms Behind the Minuum Keyboard

Author here: That video is an in-house demo of an early prototype on a Samsung Galaxy Gear, so yes it works on those! Minuum isn't yet shipping on any smart watches, but we're hoping to have something out as soon as possible.

wxson Model Your Users: Algorithms Behind the Minuum Keyboard

Good idea, there are a number of other interesting topics we could do follow ups on. Maybe we can get everyone as excited about keyboards as we are!

wxson Millennial women have seriously narrowed the wage gap with men

I can't tell how serious the question is, but: how about anything that serves the poor, such as providing warm clothing for the homeless in the winter? Providing dental care for drug addicts?

wxson Experiments to do with your baby

My parents taught me to count on my fingers with binary, which lets you get to 31 on one hand, and 1023 on two. I've found that to be a small thing of huge value when doing simple counting tasks, such as counting syllables or words in a short text, where you can't just keep a count in your head.

wxson Facebook knows you’re gay before you do

This is exactly right. I mean I think Facebook is as creepy as the next guy, but this article makes the unsubstantiated claim that Facebook guessed his orientation. Unless they have some secret new interface for their advertisers in this case it's unlikely. That said I'm sure they could predict this with a high level of accuracy if they wanted to.

wxson Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World

I also found it very surprising that cameras could pick these things up, there's actually an iPhone app from Philips that claims to be able to be able to read heart-rate, I assumed it was snake-oil at first :

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vital-signs-camera-philips/id...

wxson Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World

If people find this compelling, they may also like this earlier work from the same group:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/celiu/motionmag/motionmag.html

This other algorithm amplifies only motion, and the algorithm is less elegantly simple, however its results are very interesting and fun to watch as well. Make sure to watch the video at the bottom of the page

http://people.csail.mit.edu/celiu/motionmag/VIDEO_siggraph_2...

wxson In depth review of the Lytro Light Field Camera

I agree with you in that I don't see the "living pictures" aspect as particularly useful, I think you'll probably have a given point you want to be in focus, and rarely will want to switch between foreground and background.

I see it as more useful in that it eliminates the issue where you take a great photo and then realize that the focus was off. It's a shame the resolution is so low, but I think this is a very interesting first commercial foray into the area.

wxson Microsoft Research shows off see-through 3D display

I think that would defeat the whole purpose of the display being transparent so that you can see your hands. The display itself is not "3d" but is simply changing the perspective displayed based on the position of the user's head.

wxson WikiLeaks begins publishing 5 million emails from Stratfor

I found this one particularly fun to read: http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/1239829_fyi-.html (Sorry, it's a doc).

A glossary of the intelligence jargon that they use, written in an entertaining style.

wxson Wikipedia's list of lists of lists

Of course, that set contains itself: scroll to L and there's a self-reference.

wxson Visualising optimal target points in Darts (for different player skill levels)

There's an interesting discontinuity in where it's optimal to aim here; excellent players should aim at the top-centre "triple 20". Pretty much everyone else should aim below-left of the bulls-eye or thereabouts.

wxson Wikimedia NYC accepting Bitcoin donations

You'd be hard-pressed to get a proper tax-receipt for your donation though. A downside to the anonymity.

wxson Google Maps now WebGL accelerated

Although as far as I can tell right now the only new "eye candy" is a swooping transition when you switch between map and street-view.

wxson Hitachi demos 3D real-world object projector

No no, see my comment. They don't project directly onto the object, and they use a number of projectors, each of which will correspond to an "angle" that you see. Sure they might not have enough pixels to mimic exactly what you see in the real world, but they can probably get decently close.

Also, with regard to your comment about making pixels look different depending on the angle, there's an alternate approach to this using stacked LCDs that's getting interesting results.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~mhirsch/hr3d/

wxson Hitachi demos 3D real-world object projector

I believe the writeup is misrepresenting how this works. It states that the system projects "on to" the object, however given that their example is an egg, which has a Lambertian (matte) surface, you would not be able to present different projections to viewers at different angles.

From the diagram, it looks like they're projecting onto a glass screen in front of the object, and it appears to be superimposed on the object using the same approach as the Pepper's ghost box [1].

Of course I may be mistaken. This is just an educated guess.

And regardless, this sounds like a really cool technology.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppers_ghost

EDIT: From the Google Translate of the Japanese press-release, this looks correct, they are using a half-silvered mirror so you can see the egg-through the mirror and also the projection reflected on the mirror

" Hitachi, respond to these needs, aiming to represent the object close to the actual images from nature, using a half mirror for combining multiple lenses and translucent, the image information captured in real-space projection of 24 units has enabled it to be displayed".

wxson Gmail.com being MITM'd by Iran using this certificate

If you want to disable diginotar's root CA on your Mac (for Safari/Chrome) you can open Keychain Access, select the "System Roots" keychain at the top left, find the diginotar certificate in the list, and delete it (or disable it, which is what I did).

EDIT: This definitely works for Safari, not 100% sure if it does for Chrome after all.

wxson Researchers use accelerometers to keylog an Android smartphone

Would it not be possible to present a sensitive page in a full-screen iframe, and then capture an approximation of what the user entered into that iframe by picking up accelerometer events from the outer page? Not a perfect hack by any stretch, since the URL would be wrong, but potentially problematic.

wxson Free icons for any object in the world

I wish I knew about iconfinder before. Very handy, thanks.

wxson Free icons for any object in the world

They actually have a post about that on their blog:

http://blog.thenounproject.com/post/7310229014/how-to-proper...

"When using a CC Attribution work created by us, please attribute it to The Noun Project and include a link whenever possible." (the post goes into more detail for CC-BY in general as well)

wxson Anonymous hacks Booz Allen Hamilton, US military contractor, 90k logins dumped

I'm not sure if I agree. One thing that's nice about HN is that I so often get the story early, otherwise I would use one of the weekly/daily best-of aggregators anyway.

The front-page is big enough that I can handle there being one post for the original raw-data, and a subsequent post for the Ars analysis.

Your other point about "cheerleading" is well taken, It is easy to get caught up in the David vs. Goliath sentiment.

wxson Google Correlate

Heh, time correlation of "exam schedule" tells a sad story.

Shifted 1 week: gpa calculator

Shifted 2 weeks: final grades

Shifted 3 weeks: academic suspension

Shifted 4 weeks: academic dismissal

http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=exam+schedule&t...

wxson Google Ngram Viewer: Why is "love" on the rise?

I thought this was going to be due to some expression coming into popularity, but I notice the same phenomenon with almost every bigram starting with "love" that I try,

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+makes&ye... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+with&yea... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+me&year_... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+you&year... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=you+love&year...

etc.

If anything, though, I feel like this may be due to a changing in the makeup of the corpus in recent years. Many queries with common words seem to exhibit the same spike after around 2000 (try "hate", "fly", "ten", "blue", etc.) perhaps the size of the average vocabulary is smaller in the newer corpus documents, in which case the overall proportion of common words would be expected to increase.

For older content, they focus on what's available in libraries so perhaps old content that's survived in libraries typically has a richer vocabulary.

Or maybe we just love more.

wxson Signal processing to music audio -- synthesis, effects, and analysis.

This looks great! Haven't watched the videos yet, but the lecture slides are good.

Side note, this may disappear after the course is over. For anyone who is interested in going through this on their own later, might I recommend

wget -rkp -np --cut-dirs=1 http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/e4896/

(Warning, this includes the lecture videos so will be multi-GB)