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zalo

35 karma · joined July 15, 2018

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zalo··on Creepy Crawlies
One natural counter to this is to dynamically alter the computing algorithm per request (variants of Anubis?) so that the scrapers would need to rewrite their accelerator each time or just use the unoptimized JS version...
zalo··on A new, thin-lensed telescope design could far surpass James Webb
Fun Fact: Diffractive optics exhibit chromatic aberration in the opposite direction to Refractive optics, so the two can be used together to cancel each other out!

Of course, that doesn’t help with the weight on a space-based telescope, but it was being considered quite frequently for VR Headsets a few years ago.

zalo··on A new, thin-lensed telescope design could far surpass James Webb
Perhaps they should have started at the Wikipedia entry for “Zone Plate” instead
zalo··on Tangle - Simple Multiplayer / Networked WebAssembly
I wonder if it will allow syncing WASM Emulators like N64Wasm…

Would be awesome to use it to enable online gaming!

zalo··on Can brown noise turn off your brain?
There are mechanical ambient noise generators that generate sound via fans and rushing air in a special cavity; a popular one is the Marpac Dohm.

I've considered 3D printing custom shells for it to further tune the sound profile to achieve the brown noise ideal.

zalo··on Retraction of Roomtemperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride
That’s a shame; I hope they’re allowed to come back in a revised article.

…or perhaps Nature felt it was too early for a discovery of this magnitude to be published ;-)

zalo··on Mighty: The Browser You Didn’t Know You Needed but Definitely Do
Kasm is a self-hosted alternative that’s free and avoids the security issues.
zalo··on Engineer turns plastic into bricks that are reportedly stronger than concrete
Mixing graphite into HDPE appears to make it immune to UV photo-degradation.

There’s even a company that capitalizes on this by making durable boat hulls with it: https://tidemanboats.com/

Not sure how it holds up in plasphalt, but it could be worth exploring graphite additives.

zalo··on Exposure to 835MHz RF-EMF induces hyperactivity and demyelination in mice (2017)
I've noticed Apple products can feel like they buzz when plugged in, but I assumed it was just the inverter and poor grounding...

Do you think a multimeter or oscilloscope would be able to pick up the potential between the device and ground?

zalo··on Fornjot: A next-generation Code-CAD application
You can even get an OpenCascade IDE running in your browser! https://github.com/zalo/CascadeStudio
zalo··on Accurate Image Alignment and Registration Using OpenCV
Actually base-OpenCV has a great function for this: `cv2.findTransformECC()`: https://learnopencv.com/image-alignment-ecc-in-opencv-c-pyth...

It can do dense translation, translation + rotation, Affine, and Homography alignment; I've used it in the past to do sub-pixel Aruco/AprilTag alignment (and I'd probably also use it for astrophotography).

zalo··on Socrates on the blessing of being refuted
Are you kidding? If someone really has good evidence for the Earth being flat, that could potentially be one of the most important observations of all time!

As the Litany of Tarski goes: “If the Earth is flat, I desire to believe the Earth is flat…” etc.

(Though, I will admit that it gets boring later when you’ve heard all the arguments and rebuttals.)

zalo··on Ask HN: How to travel by train without vibrations / getting shaken up
Since the train only shakes side to side (and not up-down or forwards-backwards), you only really need spring dampening along one axis.

While you could set up a linear rail with some pretensioned bungie cables (similar to how the Hover Glide backpacks work), I’d recommend using parallel leaf springs as they’re lightweight, low-form factor, mechanically simple, and low stiffness.

Here are some links to 3D printed inspiration: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2574629 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4738960 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4411343

The key to supporting human weight is to replace the thin plastic leaf springs with sheet metal. You can also add more springs in parallel (increasing the weight it can support, but reducing the travel).

And some of my gifs of them in motion: https://imgur.com/a/YH4HQpo

zalo··on Metabolism in adulthood does not slow as commonly believed, study finds
While they might be linked, I find it difficult to believe modern males have lower testosterone than pre-80’s females (which I’d expect if simply “Low-T” was causing the current surge in obesity in both genders).

It’s possible the threshold (where Testosterone is converted to Estrogen) is lowering, and both fat deposition and other things are all downstream effects of phthalates.

However it’s just as likely that this is due to antibiotic-contamination in food changing our gut flora, or Pesticides/Lithium/PFAS/High-Fructose-Corn-Syrup/EM-Radiation/Elevation are messing with our homeostatic equilibrium in other ways…

It would be interesting to find a study that controlled for each of these factors to find the strongest correlates.

zalo··on Metabolism in adulthood does not slow as commonly believed, study finds
Another interesting clue to add to a growing body of evidence that the obesity epidemic is due to an unidentified environmental contaminant and not explicit changes to diet or “discipline”: https://twitter.com/mold_time/status/1412827749828513800?s=2...
zalo··on Can we have democracy without political parties?
Even worse, two parties with animosity against each other will rank each other at the bottom of stack, allowing the generally amicable independents to sweep the election. It’s the perfect way to incentivize depolarization.
zalo··on Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Sequel Trailer from Nintendo
Everything in BotW has that formulaic/modular/cookie-cutter feel that a Bethesda game does. None of the side quests particularly stood out to me, whereas I’ll frequently recall hidden gem areas in OoT and Wind Waker with fondness.

It’s clear that it was a game that was produced highly in parallel, with independent parallel teams (of interns?) and obscene levels of modular asset reuse. Exploration is often rewarded with a cookie-cutter item, or (even worse) a Korok seed rather than an expansion of the lore or new stories.

Many of the things I hate about procedurally generated games or the recent spate of mass production open world games (ie Genshin Impact) are present in BotW.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are games like Dark Souls, with relatively little asset reuse and great lore-expanding rewards for exploration.

zalo··on Minims
Many of these are similar to malaphors: https://www.reddit.com/r/malaphor/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Malaphors/
zalo··on The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins
Can’t we tell whether the 4% difference between SARS-Cov2 and RaTG13 is responsible for the Furin Cleavage site?

If so, that would be a huge connection suggesting GoF and the template coronavirus SARS-Cov2 was based on

zalo··on I spent some time exploring how to improve the UX of code blocks on the web
Would be nice to see Intellisense-style hover tooltips on code-blocks someday (via referencing a `.d.ts` or `.ts` file).

There might be some minimalist way to get Monaco into read-only mode for it...

zalo··on Show HN: CascadeStudio a New MIT-Licensed SCAD Tool Built on Modern Technologies
Hi HN, I've been working on this tool for the last couple of months, and I feel like you guys might appreciate it.

I love OpenSCAD, but it's showing it's age. So I decided to build a luxury version with VS Code's Editor (with Intellisense!) and a WebAssembly-port of OpenCASCADE (the same BREP CAD Kernel in FreeCAD and CadQuery). Everything is client-side, from the model compilation to the deflate-encoded shareable URLs. You can even install the editor to your computer (or even Chromebook!)

Given the recent news from Autodesk making everyone skittish about the future mobility of their .STEP files, I figure that CascadeStudio can provide another place for people to edit and share their 3D Models and BREP designs.

Thanks for taking a look!

zalo··on We built a new GPS receiver engine
There's a recent presentation on one from NASA: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/286393566.pdf
zalo··on Ask HN: What are some open source alternative to Zoom
I discovered Peer Calls last night and think it’s an awesome project! It worked flawlessly from both my phone and desktop; it’s one of the (surprisingly few) fully featured WebRTC chat apps!

My one hope: Could it be possible to select from different audio bitrates when on a direct connection? High bandwidth audio seems like one of the huge selling points of P2P chat applications. My naive assumption is that it’s the sampleRate constraint on the audio stream, but I’m not sure how the compression works...

zalo··on Show HN: Gifcap, a browser based client-side GIF screen recording tool
Nice UI; I really like the timeline view!

I would highly recommend adding .webm export (since Browser-based .webm encoding strongly correlates with the ScreenCapture API). If you'd like an example, you can reference my take on this: https://gifcorder.com/

There's also an Emscripten implementation of Gifsicle which you can use to reduce the size of the .gif (at the cost of color depth and encoding time).

zalo··on Show HN: Moving from a desktop hologram lab to a 3D hologram printer
Hi Paul, I'm a big fan of your work democratizing holography, and I love the idea of a small-scale hologram printer.

If you need any assistance with a Unity, Three.js (WebGL), or Shadertoy rendering engine, let me know. I'm the software lead for Project North Star (Open Source AR Headset), and I've done miscellaneous other exotic display integrations and calibrations (ie shadertoys for the Looking Glass Display and a few CAVEs).

My absolute dream would be to print HOEs (but I'm unsure those are within the limitations of digital holography). I imagine holograms bent into a cylinder (that can be viewed from any direction), followed by shiny (metallic) objects and far-field subjects will look the most striking.

Will the printer be "full-color" too? Countering the chromatic distortion effects of the holographic film sounds like a fun challenge.

zalo··on Zdog – Pseudo-3D JavaScript engine for Canvas and SVG
Perhaps if you want to stay truer to the spirit of the system, then you might have zDog generate faux depth buffers for each of its shapes (using gradients when necessary).

Then you might still take advantage of Chrome’s “optimized” SVG rasterization, but also use the GPU to do depth compositing on the color buffer afterward. As a bonus, depth-fade intersection shaders could work (which are tricky with raymarching).

zalo··on A Short Intro to Constraints
The first post is done in Paper.js, while the rest of them are done in Three.js. The scripts in MathUtilities are for the Unity3D game engine.

All of them are excellent graphics frameworks (though with strengths in 2D, 3D, and standalone content respectively).

zalo··on Better Language Models and Their Implications
Does it seem like there will be any way to go backwards from the sample to the prompt?

From a safety perspective, it would be useful to see what prompt a piece of text might have been generated with...

zalo··on XxHash – an extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm
Unsure about the Q.Score, but for large data, MeowHash appears to also be a solid choice for non-cryptographic hashing: https://mollyrocket.com/meowhash

A comparison that a user ran vs. xxHash: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9pr5ir/meow_ha...

zalo··on Computing normals for 3D Bézier curves
While it may be less efficient, it seems like the rotation minimizing frame can be constructed more intuitively with quaternions.

Using Unity's functions, it looks like the rotation for the current point can just be: ``` Q(t) = Quaternion.LookRotation(P(t)-P(t-1), Q(t-1) * Vector3.up); ``` (where Q is the list of rotations and P is the set of Points)

Possible also with the method IQ defines in this article (accumulating aligning delta rotations over the course of the curve): http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/noacos/noacos.htm