skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
New startup aiming to be the Netflix for mobile content closes $1B in funding
I can't disagree more. I actually think the opposite.

Games and stuff are nice, but everyone I've known that uses a vive or oculus gets tired of needing to move around in VR pretty fast.

But being able to get rid of the 3-4 screens on my desk, and replace them with a headset that I wear? That I can put windows everywhere? Behind me, far left, even throw one up above me to glance at? That's HUGE imo. And the cost can quickly make sense.

I'm in the market for a new set of screens for my machine. I want to go to 4k. I'm looking at realistically $1500 for new screens. If something like Magic Leap or hololens was only 2x more than that and could get even "1080p equivalent" resolution compared to my screens, i'd happily drop the extra cash right now.

Yes, it's still not at that point as far as I can tell, but I don't think needing to increase resolution a bit is going to be the thing that ends up making VR/AR "impossible".
I'm not using a credit card.
It's exactly the opposite.
Hololens is 3000$, it's heavier on your head because it has only one piece, the battery life is shorter and the field of view is much smaller (30x17.5 for hololens vs 40X30 for magic leap).
> Get rid of screeens and wear a headset that lets you put application windows anywhere in your view.

I don't think wearing headsets is a practical way to do everyday computing and it can even be bad for your eyes.

With a monitor you can look away, look out the window, etc. but with a headset the screen is always in front of your eyes, so you have to take the whole thing off if you want to give your eyes some rest from the screen.

It may be good for shorter special tasks like gaming, vr assisted surgery and such, but it doesn't seem a good match for programming, for example, which you do all day.
if you're worried about the "zero" traffic situation I am not sure you also need to worry much about the "massive" traffic situation
After a century of "cars are the actual first-class citizens, everybody else is merely tolerated," this attitude doesn't suprise me: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
The fact that it’s ambiguous is itself misleading. Typical headlines.
In india the opposite is true. A significant fraction of student admitted through race quota fail and drop out. Now they want to reduce the exam difficulty for them!
4.1% of death row inmates are wrongfully executed[1]. That's with literal years of due process and investigation and trial, not just a cop with reasonable suspicion. Can you imagine how many people must be wrongfully arrested and only released on bail?

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cost-of-convicti...
Will China Ever Recognise Cryptocurrencies?
That's funny--my impression is that it's a popular concept in America, and growing increasingly so, especially with the new-style Main St. (parodied on South Park and probably elsewhere).

That may be more true in have versus have-not cities, though.
It is pretty common to be greeted warmly once you are a regular.

I have a few bistros where I am a regular, and in each the waiters are very friendly and welcoming.

It might depend on the location, I tend to avoid places that are too touristic
Google’s AI thinks this turtle looks like a gun, which is a problem (2017)
Microsoft case results in prison time for restore CD copier [video]
So far, one of the more informative, balanced articles I have seen on Magic Leap.

I still remain curious what do they really mean by the lightfield. Does anyone have more information here?

The best I can infer is they don’t actually have a “screen” with pixels per say, but they somehow attenuate the light as it goes through the “rectangle”. Why I say this is different than pixels is that it almost seems like they are doing something more “analog”. By attenuating the light as it comes in, rather than adding its own light, I see how that you could get a different “type” of light that may be better from a human processing perspective. The “screen” would effectively consist of a high resolution array of “windows” that selectively attenuate the light going through them. It would also explain why they can’t take “video” of the experience.

Do others agree with my shot in the dark? Or is there some other way they could be realizing this technology?
I've lived here for 22 years and it seems about the same to me as a pedestrian.
Google Pixel 3XL leak shows production hardware and wired USB-C Pixel Buds
But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics.

Sure you can. It's how Jobs turned Apple around. By all accounts, nobody had metrics saying consumers wanted less choice. No metrics suggested that a music player with "no wireless [and] less space than a nomad" would be a market leader. No metrics, as far as I'm aware, showed that there was a huge demand for Unix-like stability and command line tools but without the need for tinkering just to get a great UI and commercial software support.

It's difficult, certainly, and requires a nearly pathological drive to make your product as good and polished as possible - a drive that most people don't have today, including Tim Cook. But it can be done.
In theory, if the screen is projected onto a surface (like a wall) there should be no reason you can't look away from it.
> macho fascination

What does this mean?
For widespread adoption we would need to wait another 10-15 years until semiconductors get <5nm, allowing low-power performance at the level of 1080Ti or better, unless we are fine wearing a backpack with a larger machine and battery.
>There’s no way out of this mess except for fixing the subway and congestion pricing.

Good luck with that. Politicians have private drivers shuttle them everywhere -- If they took the subway into work, we'd have a much better state of affairs.
Maybe the scientists involve did think twice before embarking on such an endeavor?
>I don't want a new "device", a new os, a new "platform", I want a screen that I strap to my face.

Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what you (the consumer) wants. Do you want a single search engine that dominates 90+% of the market and serves shitty ads to you all over the internet? Do you want a single walled garden for your social presence online that captures/sells your data and serves you shitty ads? Do you want 2 main mobile OS’s that tightly control their platforms and the apps available to you?

I will say this though...people saying they want a screen strapped to their face, as you did, is an advertisers wet dream and these tech companies can’t wait to sell you that screen and serve you those ads.
The global heat wave as seen by satellites, airplanes, and weather stations
Soon: The Magic Leap and Theranos auctions.
Have used a Pi-hole for two years and maybe had to whitelist one or two sites (easily found looking at the log), which was easy using Pi-hole's web interface

Additionally, you can simply disable Pi-hole for temporary timeframes using the web interface as well, it has options like "Disable for 15 minutes", if you don't want to bother adding things to a whitelist.

I've used all sorts of financial, ordering, etc. sites and generally have not run into an issue. A single credit card site was one of the two I had to whitelist, and it was easy.
Why? Seems like a perfect medium for programming, once done well. Think where this will be in 15 years. Imagine being able to have as many "screens" of whatever size that you want. Hell, what would it even mean to have a "screen" anymore? You can just have your application windows floating in space.
> What happens if it's a public good like blockchain state?

Can't these be nodes use pruning such that this state is only needed for "full nodes"? (yes, this does mean less decentralization). Aren't full nodes already incentivized to store and backup the 75GB somewhat by the coin's stakers?

> And worse, we don't trust anyone to encrypt it properly. We need something totally different that anyone can check and anyone can decode.

We don't trust anyone but we might trust "everyone". If you had a backup that was signed by several devs or community leaders, it would probably be "good enough."

I think the solution is interesting but the problem less so.
I wish I could favorite comments on HN
This is very interesting as a piece of analysis, but I would caution folks against believing that this kind of complicated process is necessary to make striking photos.

Photography is an artistic endeavor, and art is strongest when it includes an intuitive aspect. That's how a photo becomes your photo, not just a nice-looking photo. And while reading art criticism can help develop intuition, it's even more important to just perceive a lot of art. Photo exhibitions, books, online galleries, etc that you view will all go into your brain and get mixed around. Then you start taking pictures and reviewing your own work, to see what worked and what didn't--for you, the artist.

To be a strong photographer, there's no substitute for just looking at a lot of photography and taking a lot of pictures. Articles like this can give you mental tools to reason about what you're feeling, but the essence of art is the feeling.

The one simple piece of advice for landscape photographers is that you're taking a picture of light. Most of the example photos in this article were taken in interesting light. A lot of them would be boring photos (despite strong composition theory) if taken at noon on a clear day.

Edit to add: I incline toward landscape photography myself, and two books that have really stuck with me are Examples by Ansel Adams and Mountain Light by Galen Rowell. Hearing (well, reading) from the artist about their decisions in making a striking image provides a more subjective perspective on photography--a good counterpoint to what I'd call a more observational or analytical approach like in the linked article.
yes, you're exactly right :) vive open source!

to be clear i didn't mean for my comment above to sound sarcastic -- i know how much effort goes into a project like this and its appreciated by linux users the world over
Who is going to lend tens of thousands of dollars to an 18 year old with no income, no assets, and no credit?

So, just to be clear 18 year olds getting tens of thousands in dischargeable loans is ridiculous, but 18 year olds getting tens of thousands in non-dischargeable loans makes total sense?

I mean, I understand why if you are a person making money off student loans, the latter is a great situation to have. But for anyone else, I'm not sure I agree that it's something we should fight for.
Do you have examples of such platforms? Also, your point is legit, but think about a vast number of online services which do not measure anything. A plethora of financial services (insurers, I won't even dare), and other rigid institutions.
> Most of them are pretty bad at it IMO (I admit that would be too if I was doing that).

The problem is that beginners are often eager to blog about things they've learned and although they haven't fully grasped the concepts it's tempting to show what you are able to do. This leads to a lot of bad examples and incorrect code on such blogs, most often it stays uncorrected.

> I'll say that the internet is kinda unwelcoming plays a part. I did share some in my past career. Posted on reddit.

Reddit is unwelcoming with childishly stubborn users. I wish it wasn't the case, but I don't have any hopes that it will ever change.
I'm curious, when is server time ever worth more than developer time?

I mean, sure, if you're doing something as a hobby and consider your own time free but have to pay $5 for a VM somewhere, then maybe.

But especially at large companies, my experience has always been that for any work done the cost of infrastructure is basically a rounding error compared to the cost of developer time. And that doesn't even begin to include the cost of support team time for the eternity that everything seems to need to be maintained for in larger companies.

As a recent example, I know that the amount each developer on a team I've worked on costs (not how much they are paid, all contractors from various companies), per person, more than it would cost to buy a mid range server, colocate it in a data center etc - per day. So after a year, if we just bought infrastructure instead of developer time, we could have had a handy ~15,000 mid range servers racked and ready to go.
Do you have a writeup expanding this further? Or maybe contact information. I like learning interesting workflows like this. My contact is in my username
I still don't quite get how Magic Leap's "Lightfield" display is different from that of other augmented reality devices. The article has a few things to say about this, but I still don't really understand:

> A Dynamic Digital Lightfield is a binocular display that can project digital objects into the world such that light enters the eye as if it were reflected from a real object. Our lightfield is biomimetic (mimics our biology/physiology). Magic Leap One creates a seamless experience where digital and analog lightfields combine into a single scene. For example, with Magic Leap One, you can render digital flowers in a physical vase so they can appear fresh every day.

Like that. How is that different from what Hololens does?

> Abovitz told me that the light can only be interpreted by a human — not a camera — so part of his problem in launching his product is that he can't film the experience.

How is a camera sufficiently different from the human eye that you physically can't film an image through the headset? Or is this just saying you can't film it in the sense that a flat image on a monitor can't really convey the experience of trying the headset on for yourself? (The latter is a well known problem with VR.) If the latter, again, how is that different from Hololens?

All-in-all the product does look promising; it appears to be less bulky than competing headsets and the devkit is less expensive too. I'm just not sure whether the display technology is a competitive advantage or not.
But don't screens only hurt our eyes because they are at a fixed focal point?

With a good AR headset, that focal point can be adjusted and moved around (possibly even in realtime if you want, move a screen to be "further away from you"). Not to mention that when you aren't looking at something that the headset is "generating", it's just basically a clear piece of plastic that you can see through. They are basically bad sunglasses.

You can look away from a "projected" screen just as easily as you can look away from a physical screen.
Magic Leaps starts selling $2,300 AR headset
How do you store it for when night comes? If you live near a mountain you could pump it up during the day but not everyone is that lucky. Now what about winter when its overcast half the time and solar panels barely work? Just think how much additional capacity needs to be built to allow for these long periods youre not making power. Basically one has to build 3-4x the capacity to supply what one coal plant produces nonstop.

The next Rockerfeller will be the one who stores gigawats on the cheap
That would be true of their gases.
Mobile App Success Story: DU Recorder
You are not original or creative on Instagram
So basically, you want multiple desktops a la Win 10 Virtual Desktops or KDE activities, but instead of pressing a key combo to switch between desktops, you want to rotate your head? And then in order to stay in the virtual desktop you've selected, you want to have to keep your head pointed at a particular angle?

Are you sure about this?
The solution is to stop orienting our society around institutional learning. We have a global information network. We need to orient society around individual learning, not academia.

Kids living at home and taking (mostly) pre-programmed online courses should be the norm. It is vastly cheaper, and can deliver more consistently better results.
Have you seen how the usual mathematician/physicist programs? They "google as they go", looking up everything, copy-pasting from stackoverflow, etc.
Well, IMHO (no offense meant), memorizing programming manuals makes one a good lonely programmer.

To become a 'professional software engineer', one must learn to be a team-player within a group of persons tasked in building and maintaining a piece of software that will stand the test of time. Which requires a very different skill set. One can be a good SE and still be relying on auto-completion and inline help in one's favorite text editor.

Remembering the API of your languages definitely helps, but actually building softwares that will be used by real users, for years, that's what makes you a 'professional software engineer'.
I mean if we can derive enough information about the user from the data that is strictly necessary otherwise, then the privacy is already doomed, and all efforts to protect it with some legislation will be inevitably in contradiction just with how technology works.
I'm forced to interact with certain people in my life through certain social media tools, but I lost interest in most if it a long time ago. I've tried to quantify what it is that made it so exciting at first, and the best thing I can think of is that I used to meet new people or engage with people I wanted to get to know better when things were first kicking off.

I never wanted it to become the way I talk to my folks, I wanted to talk to that cute girl in my class or some guy in Russia that happened to like the Smashing Pumpkins too. Maybe I'm not using it right, but it seems more difficult to find new people while wading through ads and political posts from peripheral friends.
I wish they had implemented parallelism based on the actor model. It seems like the perfect high-level abstraction for managing parallel processes. All of the asyncio stuff feels too fine-grained for Python-style development.
The reality is that you should be learning how to prove, not memorizing proofs.

The student who was most prepared would be able to derive proofs (by the process that was taught, like knowing to apply a theorom, or being comforatable with induction, etc) in a timely manner.

The exam is there to see how well you grasp the material taught, not how good at winging it you are (which is a very useful skill of course, but not the one being tested)
Thats why I really think the first breakthrough will be with professional work. I would buy a hololens today if it meant i could place application windows anywhere in my view without a need for screens, and at a high enough resolution.

I don't care if i'm tethered to a $3000 desktop PC, because I have an office anyway and it's where i'm going to work.
HN users can leave a text description on their profile,
which you can access by clicking on their username. Usually they put links or contact info in it
I find this line of logic tempting, but this seems to not apply to my scenario at all- hear me out.

Major: ECE
Job: Software Engineer
Debt: Some private variable rate, some public fixed rate. The highest private loans were originally around 100bp higher than my public, and eventually jumped to a 300bp gap, but by that point I had paid them off so it didn't impact me.
Credit rating: Pretty high- no missed payments, multi-year-old account, has multiple lines of credit.

All of my re-fi offers, for the most part, have advertised lower interest rates than my private loans and the lower bound of their advertised rate was slightly less (50-100 bp) than my public loans. However, when I'd start going through the process my offered interest rate would end up around the median of the rate window they were offering, and refinancing would have been a wash.

This meant refinancing only would have made sense for my private loans, not public. By the time I had seen these offers, it didn't make sense for me to refinance because by that point I had paid off the highest interest private loans (as general debt repayment strategy suggests)!

I don't think the incentive to refinance from a government loan is there because those interest rates are already pretty good. Obviously, someone might make a poor decision and refinance with a higher rate "because it's easier" but if my case generalizes I can only see private lenders suffering because of higher rates.

On a side note, I also don't want to get rid of my government debt too soon in case some sort of policy change occurs in my favor. This isn't to say I'm not pursuing an aggressive debt strategy, just that my private loans are my higher priority.
An anonymous beta test participant reported that Valve encountered a similar problem before the release of Counter-Strike: Source. Players with a Transmeta CPU could see the bullets flying. The cause had to do with the internal CPU timer.
We do actually (»varetægtsfængslet« in Danish), but I forgot the appropriate term in English. I thought given the context that we were talking about bails, I didn't have to be specific.
As soon as I read this, I wondered if someone had written some elisp to do it. Sure enough, org-drill[0] exists and implements spaced-repetition learning. In true emacs fashion, it actually implements three different algorithms which one can choose from!

Just looking at it briefly, it appears to be pretty nice.

0: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html
People don't get motion sick from the fps, latency and fov of current gen (PC) VR (90 fps, ~0ms, ~100°). They get motion sick from vection and maybe from vergence accomodation conflict.
My last job was running a lot of open source stuff and they spent maybe 20 hours per week troubleshooting things, multiple people together, while the rest of the team was waiting.

It was a complex environment with high availability though, with maybe 15 different types of software trying to work together...

After using AWS for a while, I have to say that things usually work and don't suddenly start to malfunction, even when not doing serverless.

Downsides of serverless is definently vendor lock in, but I think having the complexity of open source software in house, and being able to try new software, is a double edged sword that can cost huge money as well.

It's not a simple choice.
Excellent question. I have found that I need office suites less and less. The reason I still have an Office365 subscription is for Onedrive and Onenote, for the few remaining classic documents I use Libreoffice because I found that I almost never exchange pure .doc-files with anyone, so no focus on perfect compatibility is needed and I do not want to grow some dependency on Microsoft somehow (nothing against MS, I just like independence).

To answer your question: I only use Libreoffice to write write the occasional letter to state authorities and to write my invoices (which are few). For serious documents, I exclusively use LaTeX as I love not having to care about layout details (it sometimes takes time to figure new stuff out, like putting graphics into the perfect place, but when a deadline is near, the layouting is nothing I have to care about any more).
How to Protect Privacy While People Share Information Between Apps and Services
It sounds like it's more intrusive than most of the GDPR cookie notice spam that's been appearing on sites. But if it's causing users to start noticing and asking questions about the tracking on web sites, then GDPR seems to be working. (uBlock Origin also seems to be working because I didn't see the notice.)
Probably the part where he doesn't actually ever say it's a difference in perspective- that's your take. He says AKS is terrible, etc, etc. You're giving him a benefit of the doubt, which I appreciate, but he's gone too far in his bias. Maybe underlying it is a real issue, that clearly hackernews wants to indulge, but the threshold has been crossed.
The Role of Machine Learning in Data Management – The New Stack
It's interesting to know that!

How can I ensure, as an user, that the website I'm using doesn't store sensitive data locally ?
Toit [video, DK]