skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why don't phones have stereo cameras?
I was doing 3D stereoscopic and augmented reality research in college almost 20 years ago. The cameras, video cards, workstations, etc were pricey, BUT some pretty neat results could be had.

Fast forward to 2017, we have powerful computers in our pockets with awesome sensors. We also have seen some push into the virtual reality market using the phone as a screen.

My question: why haven't the phone makers (specifically Samsung) started making phones with two cameras on the back face, spaced at an approximate distance of the human eyes?

The size of the phone has seemed to have stabilized where the length of the phone is approximately the width of the average human face (a result of intelligent design perhaps?).

The precise width separation of the cameras doesn't have to be exactly the width of our eyes to give the illusion of depth.

It seems that the ability to take, send, and view 3D pictures and videos is ripe and relatively untapped. Also the post-processing opportunities (depth-of-field, etc) seem much greater with stereoscopic images.

Any thoughts?

(My prediction is that before 2020, stereoscopic cameras on smartphones will become commonplace and perhaps so obvious that we will wonder why we didn't do that sooner)
I'm not sure it's true that Mozilla has rebounded. Only a few years ago it used to be a neck and neck race between Chrome and Firefox to see how quickly new browser features get developed.

Now it seems that Chrome has pulled far ahead, and Firefox is often in 3rd place. I can't think of too many recent features that FF has been a leader on. SW kinda, I guess, but that's it.

Often either Edge or Safari is also faster to adopt (Safari with web components, for example), depending on the feature.
Sorry I clicked on the wrong 'reply' button, comment now moved to the right location, sorry again.
Not so sure we are going to see an automation completely replace doctors. Just look at all the problems both technical as well as social in the self-driving cars arena. There lot more people are qualified to be drivers than to practice medicine.

Instead, I think we'll see more powerful diagnostic tools at the disposal for physicians to use. Doctors will still play an important role in treating their patients and will be more effective because they'll have powerful tools assisting them.

But to your point, will technology help patients feel more empowered in their medical encounters? Or to get more value out of their interactions with their doctors? https://www.remedymedical.com/ seems to think their platform will do just that for primary care / telemedicine visits.
Executive Order – Protecting the Nation Against Attacks by Foreign Nationals
What add-ons were those? Just curious, since Firefox feels sort of slow on MacOS for me.
If you look at the cutting edge of browser tech lately, and you read between the lines as to why the browser makers are doing this, you can see that there's a pretty significant trend now towards browsers actually fighting the web itself, because once multiprocess is done and modulo a 2 or 3x rendering speedup that Servo may be able to bring (which will probably be the last advance of that size), the only way for a browser to feel "less klunky" or "speedier" than its competition will be for it to render less of the web. That is, the classic optimization of doing less work.

Which in this case means trashing all the shitty ads and plugins from 15 different sites and synchronous JS trackers, since that happens to be what's klunking up the web. Which, fortunately for the browsers, gives them cover to do this under the guise of working for the user, because there's a lot of truth there, but in some sense it's still just cover, too.

It is in some sense a change of an era; browsers are moving out of a phase of enabling and empowering content creators and slowly moving into active conflict with them. As slowly as possible in some sense, because it's scary for them, but it's something they're being forced to do. It's the same effect where computer users will blame "Microsoft" or "Dell" for the computer being slow, when the problem is actually a slow hard drive or something; eventually it stops mattering that it isn't "your" fault and you have to do something about it.

Big changes in the browser space in the next five years here, I think. Content producers so far have only tepidly fired back at ad blockers and stuff because they're still very niche, but they are getting less niche very fast now.
Same here. What's up with the country restrictions?
Bingo! for hybrid development, I don't see anything better out there than ionic.

Key point - for hybrid development. There are a lot of use cases where hybrid mobile apps are appropriate (CRUD). With ever more powerful devices, the argument for hybrid increases.
'common sense'?
This is neat. This isnt quite javascript (which is neither good nor bad) but I think has a lot of potential
I know what it is, so why would that be a better question for me? If you want to ask what e10s is for your own information, that's fine.
K, not Q? nice! if you don't mind me asking, where? i am curious who is using K these days.
Employers arent just whining the skills gap is real
It doesn't, because it's an overly simplistic example.

Here is a better one: on the island there is you, me and Bob. Bob does not participate in our trades, but is responsible for things like protecting the island from neighboring tribes, putting out forest fires we accidentally start while camping, and building the paths and roads we use to get around the island.

These things not only benefit us, it can easily be argued that our everyday trades would not be possible without them. Without roads I would not be able to reach you, without Bob's protection I would be robbed or worse on the way to meet you.

This is why Bob is inherently entitled to a portion of our income. Without Bob, the environment in which you and I can comfortably conduct business would not exist.
From the title I understood you meant "how to quantify stress in general". It's something so subjective and you can never know how whimpy or brave people are. I really like the idea of asking for what one would sacrifice for the discomfort to go away.

Would you move 2 workdays to the weekend so you can work in peace? Would you move to another town if there was a less stressfull job, all else equal?
http://hyperpolyglot.org/rust

Here is a pretty good comparison between Rust/Swift/Scala
Anti-trust laws should be more complex than that. Having a disproportionate control over the market is already a problem. And Apple have control over which features in HTML gain adoption, and which not, by refusing to implement ones they don't like, and refusing other browsers on iOS. This has negative influence on the whole browser market, way beyond iOS itself.
In India, if you earn < 2.5 lac/year (about $3500), you don't owe any taxes. The gdp/capita is about 1 lac/year (about $1500). The worker described in the article is making about $200/month or 1.6 lac/year.

The actual issue right now isn't so much taxes. It's not having physical cash. No matter how many crores you have in your bank account, you can't pay workers (many of whom have no bank account) if you can't withdraw physical bank notes. Further, even if you could transfer money to those workers, they can't buy vegetables unless they can find a vegetable seller who takes PayTM.

In India, most of the economy is cash based. The primary exception is in major cities where credit cards and PayTM (think Indian version of WeChat payments) have suddenly become vital. Suddenly many autowales and small restaurants have PayTM QR codes. Even some vegetable sellers take PayTM!
> I don't think you can say anybodies fear is unfounded.

I also can't guarantee they won't get diabetes or heart disease, or fall off a ladder, or be hit by one of the passing cars. All of which are vastly more likely to happen than being shot, which itself is an order of magnitude more likely than an innocent person being shot. (ie, not robbing a drug dealer, etc)

Dead is dead, and a car gets you there just as quickly. Focusing on one is silly. (Unless you're a crossing-guard, for instance.)

I normally see the irrational fear (crypto-racism) argument from people who want to limit refugees. You've got a higher chance of dying from someone falling off a ladder onto you than being killed by a terrorist hiding as a refugee. I'm not saying you're a crypto-racist, I'm saying this sloppy thinking is used to support other nonsense arguments because it's so empty you can use it to support anything.
I wrote an email to Entrepreneur.com
1) A lot of embedded projects have HTTP interfaces for command & control. So that means you usually have somebody on the team who knows HTML & CSS & the giant pile of tech that is web dev these days. Which means they probably are more familiar with JS than C or any other more typical embedded scripting language like Lua.

2) C needs to be compiled and often flashed onto the device to run, sending new JS over the wire to execute is a lot more convenient, especially if you want customers to be able to customize their devices.
I'm about 5% into a side project implementing Erlang-like actors in Haskell and it provides an example of this workflow.

https://github.com/tel/hotep

Note that src/Hotep.hs exports a bunch of undefined functions. I've been able to verify that these types all make sense even without implementing a thing. As time goes on I may learn that the implementation drives the types somewhere else and then the compiler will make refactoring easy.

However, already I've gone through about 5 iterations of this design which drove me to debug some structural questions about the whole affair and also dive deep into Erlang documentation to determine how they solved problems. These explorations and their results are encoded into the types.

At this point I'm beginning to consider implementation and I can keep filling out just partial implementations against these types. I'll probably make 2 or 3 toy implementations to test out the ideas again with more strength before moving on the final ones. The whole time the types will be guiding that development and helping it move quickly.

Key to this whole affair is the need to describe types utterly before a completely successful library is made... and also the ability to defer the burden of providing type-checking code for as long as desirable. Haskell supports this wonderfully—even more wonderfully with things like Typed Holes and Deferred Type Errors which enable a really great interactive experience I haven't yet needed to employ.
>The environment fostered creativity and learning. There were no distractions or negative pressures or stressors. Being smart didn't result in being bullied, it resulted in being respected.

I think these are great benefits and we should focus on making them available for all students, regardless of whether or not they're "gifted".
While I can't speak for what happened at this company. I think the problem is not "MBAs or engineers being managers" rather them not being good listeners.

And that is the point the HBR article is also missing. In my previous job, I had manager (ex-engineer) who would often say - "I don't even understand what are you talking about". But he would always listen patiently to us and even spend some of his personal time after office or weekends on google trying to understand the issue in depth. If he came across articles/links he thought could help us, he would email us. If he couldn't do that, he always approached the upper management to provide us training or help as required.

while in my recent job I had a manager (ex-engineer) who tried his best to come across as someone with "deep expertise". He would often google topics we wanted to discuss with him. The end result wasn't pretty. Lot of times he would make an assertion that he read somewhere that the design we were presenting was unworkable. Example: while talking about a design on "messaging queues" (MQ) using RabbitMQ he insisted on using Microsoft Outlook. It can handle so much daily load of message (email) volume he said.
Making Practical Ethereum Dapps – Off-Chain and Verification Pattern
Trump isn't that unstable, I believe. He's just blindly following the call of profit (except the pussy-grabbing and sexual assault stuff). Most of the decisions of him and his team up to now can be classified as "will make Donald Trump or his team money in some weird way".

And I believe that this will land him in jail or impeachment more sooner than later.
Even in the modern day, it's pretty amazing how in the midst of the Syrian Civil War, life goes on in areas of cities that are actually experiencing fighting. Not only does regular life continue, but somehow the economy isn't completely gone.
RE 2: Firefox uses a lot of threads for image decoding, GC, compositing, running the UI. So it's nothing like running on a single core machine. Threads != processes.
Basic income can't come soon enough.
How much right-wing authoritarianism by a sitting government will or would it take to convince you that authoritarian governments are more of a problem than ideologically incoherent university students?
I wonder where all these assholes came from. I think few hundred years back there were none in US.
Agreed, "no man is an island".

On a related note, I was appalled by the howls and outcries against Obama's (entirely sensible, if maybe easily misunderstood) "you didn't build that".

(Related discussion in the "Don't tell your friends they're lucky" article/thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13437332
)
If a racing driver loses too many races, she'll eventually have to leave the field. If a casino security person presides over too many unexpected losses, he'll eventually have to exit his area of endeavor. Their expertise is under constant pressure. A scientist isn't exposed to this same pressure, nor should she be, because failure is part of the experimental process. Thus, I think "scientific expert" is a contrast in terms unless it specifically refers to one's ability to conduct the scientific method (i.e., controlled experiments) within a given domain.

For instance, consider James Hansen. There is no doubt that most climatologists consider him an expert in climatology. He ticks off many of the boxes on your list. That's fine, but the climate models he presented to Congress in 1988 don't match observations since that time [1]. That's not to say climate change (née global warming) isn't happening, but that it is happening differently than originally predicted. This nuance is lost when "expertise" is accorded to the modeler. It is lost even more when we start talking about a 97% "expert" consensus that humans are causing climate change.

Perhaps treating "experts" like predictors and somehow attaching a coefficient of determination to each one would ease my concerns.

[1] https://www.skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction.htm
Boeing Starliner spacesuit is revealed publically for the first time
>Why ? Firefox still feels slower in loading and showing web pages. It seems to freeze up occasionally. The new tab opening and scrolls have occasional jitters, sometimes sufficient to bring me out of my "flow".

And what's even better if you point that out here they'll come with their completely artificial benchmarks to show you how Firefox is x1337 faster than the rest of browsers.

Only that it isn't.

And what really worries me is that they actually believe what they say, which would mean they are refusing to work on making Firefox faster, because they think Firefox is fast already.
For 2), go to about:config and search for the "dom.ipc.processCount" preferences. Set it to the number of cores you wish and enjoy.
I'm glad we are finally coming to terms with the fact that Firefox has been a second tier browser since Chrome was released.

Everyone has love and good will for Mozilla and Firefox because Firefox showed the world what a browser and the web could be if designed correctly to some open standard.

However, the developer tools, JS performance, and overall browser tech have languished. So while we all are cheering for them to catch up, we do it sadly from a Chrome. Debugging a modern SPA on Firefox is painful.

What should have been an "oh crap, we need to up our game" moment for them was a whoosh just like the iPhone reveal was for Balmer.
Ml_sampler – Model Assisted Sampling
> It's not process-per-tab like Chrome, it's just 2 or 3 processes.

Chrome is not process-per-tab - it's process per domain. (Even that's not true - sometimes tabs from multiple domains will still share the same process).

Firefox currently uses two processes (one for the UI, and one for rendering pages), but from a technical standpoint, that's the hard part, and that's what took so many years to develop. Once you have separated UI and rendering processes, going from 1 rendering process to multiple is relatively easy - you can already configure Nightly to do this, and Mozilla is basically just waiting for (a) e10s itself to rolled out more broadly, and (b) empirical evidence on what the right number of processes is, as (a) happens.

There are some downsides to doing true process-per-tab (the main one is that it's absurdly inefficient with memory), so ultimately Firefox will probably land on something in between (like Chrome and IE do).
This is kinda confusing, but that button only exists in Nightly and Developer builds. Here's how to check, enable, and force-enable it for regular builds: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Testing
Hey, so I wrote that comment :)

> A 18650 is a size and voltage specification. As in, it's like calling a battery a AA or AAA: any AA or AAA fits into a device and makes it run, but some AAs and AAAs last a lot longer than other batteries in flat out runtime, or survive usage in abusive devices, or in extreme weather conditions, or so forth.

18650 doesn't mean anything other than a cylinder 18mm diameter by 65mm long; it doesn't imply a certain voltage or anything else. I've worked with 18650s that have voltages from 2V to 4.4V. Nonrechargeable 18650s, though quite rare, exist at even lower or higher voltages.

I've got access to several spec sheets from Panasonic, who Tesla is pairing with, in combination with public spec sheets from existing 21700 cells. My guesses at Tesla's final 21700 battery specs are a combination of these spec sheets, my own knowledge about batteries, and some physical limitations (e.x. the theoretical max power density shrinks as the cell grows, and 21700s are roughly 50% more volume than 18650s.)

> There are low grade 18650s just as there are high grade 18650s. Maximum capacity isn't the only way to measure a battery, but also it's maximum discharge rate and thermal characteristics under load; as in, larger capacity isn't always better in some use cases.

Yep, that's why I addressed those things in my comment. Thermal issues are particularly interesting with Tesla's packs.
>1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students)

While this is probably true, (although not necessarily proven), the solution to income inequality is not to cripple those ahead, it's to bolster those from behind. Regression to the mean doesn't make a better education system.

>2. Remove equality of opportunity.
That's not an argument against intellectual school segregation. Equal opportunity can be achieved by making the "gifted schools" easier to access for those who strive for it.

To your main point about how everything that benefits gifted students do benefit the entire system as a whole, I completely agree. However, the reality is that many of those features (smaller classes, better curriculum, practical education) don't scale to the population as a whole, and funding for education is limited. When there's a finite amount of resources to distribute, and the choice is between distributing to the children that are "gifted" or spread it around so thinly it might as well not have any effect at all, you bet your ass I'm going to vote for the former.
Can't wait to see this stuff in the next season of "Silicon Valley" :-)

Edit - oh, that joke's been made below already...
Sure. There's already variants like Jython that have removed the GIL.

The larger problem is the existing codebase, which is based around the assumption of non-concurrency. You also have a lot of libraries that use C extensions for performance, and a lot of those are going to break horribly if you suddenly throw them into a concurrent environment where the Python state is mutating underneath them.

Again though, "rewriting code for concurrency" is not a fundamentally unsolvable problem, it just takes a lot of engineer time to change everything over. Moving global/static state into instances, adding locks, marking atomic/critical segments, that kind of thing. There's just a lot of things built with Python that would need to be gone over.

I really think you could do a switchover on the fly by adding a Java-style "synchronized" attribute. Before you can enter a synchronized method, you set a flag and all other threads must yield at their next return, function call, loop iteration, the end of their atomic segment, or at safe points marked by a "yield" statement (pick some combination of reasonable behavior). While a synchronized method is on the call stack, no other thread may execute. All existing code is marked synchronized - perhaps any code in a .py file is assumed unsafe by default, while any code in a .jy file is assumed safe. Boom, start converting code.

The thing that really gets me is that Python 3 is already pushing breaking changes that necessitate a complete overhaul anyway. The failure to thread the interpreter/remove the GIL at the same time is a stunningly idiotic decision. How about since we are making everyone review their code anyway, we have them look at thread safety too?

Which leads to the other problem - Python is GVR's baby, and at the end of the day the reason Python 3 has a GIL is because he says so. By all means, Google could go ahead and rewrite everything, but he'd never let them call it Python. It's hard to build momentum for a serious fork like that. And you don't want to spend a bunch of engineer time and end up with an unsupported "toy" that nobody uses.

It's a shame, Python hits real close to the mark but concurrency is its Achilles' Heel. I love the language but I am gunshy about using it because you never know if your project will go from "toy" to "real product that may need to adapt/scale" and you need concurrency.
They simply didn't care. They cared about a number of elections and falling reputation of Narendra modi. Nothing else.
article's a little dated but still seems relevant. I think a lot of times companies are looking for people who have multiple years experience(so they can come in and teach best practices to the rest of the team) in technologies that have just became popular.
I did a little video about this last week: http://wakey.io/47 and tl:dr; All this does it punish the poor for using cash.

It's not so much that demonetization is bad - it's that it's hard to do with no notice. in a country this big. all at once. with so little time to phase out old bills. All the proposed benefits: more ecommerce, reduced black market transactions, better tax accountability could have been accomplished without going to such extremes. I mean, India isn't even using polymer bills yet -- so there will be at least one more big demonetization in the next 10 years.
We should all stop paying for third party enforcement of criminal and civil disputes. Any seizure of my property by the government is a curtailment of my property rights.

What benefits of the state are you willing to live without? All of them? If the answer is no you just want the line drawn further back or forward than others. My guess is like most of us you draw the line around services and benefits from the state that benefit you and people you know and not around services and benefits the state provides you deem unimportant to you and the people you know.