> I remember as a graduate student that Ingrid Daubechies frequently referred to convolution by a bump function as "blurring" - its effect on images is similar to what a short-sighted person experiences when taking off his or her glasses (and, indeed, if one works through the geometric optics, convolution is not a bad first approximation for this effect). I found this to be very helpful, not just for understanding convolution per se, but as a lesson that one should try to use physical intuition to model mathematical concepts whenever one can.
> More generally, if one thinks of functions as fuzzy versions of points, then convolution is the fuzzy version of addition (or sometimes multiplication, depending on the context). The probabilistic interpretation is one example of this (where the fuzz is a a probability distribution), but one can also have signed, complex-valued, or vector-valued fuzz, of course.
> ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study calls “extremely aggressive” blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like Match.com.
I have no trouble accessing hrw.org and match.com in Norway. I wonder is it specific to some ISPs? I also couldn’t find any law that was passed to block certain pornogrpahic websites in Wikipedia [1] and I don’t know where else to look.
I would have never upgraded from Windows 7. That OS is the best version of Windows ever. Unfortunately the hardware manufacturers have stopped making drivers (especially for laptops).
The good news is such shenanigans are forcing more and more users to move to Linux which has improved so darn much in the recent years (especially Linux Mint) that the experience is far better than Windows.
Unfortunately a lot of games and programs like Photoshop still require Windows so I'm stuck with it (play on linux never worked for me), otherwise I would be happily get rid of Widnows forever.
Firstly, your issue doesn't seem to be anything other than social anxiety
If you have to 'lose sleep' after contacting someone on LinkedIn about your product, then you are just not suited to doing a startup
Secondly, there is nothing to feel bad about
Vast majority of people are not suited to starting a company or working in a small startup
Lots of good jobs in middle and large companies for you
Thirdly, the scale of stuff you are talking about is miniscule
I walked away from a Green Card to start my company
If I didn't succeed, I would have lost access to the developed world FOREVER
You are upset that your girlfriend had to stay at home one year and you couldn't take her out for dinner????
Finally, this is a Catch 22 situation. Not sure why you are submitting this or writing about your experience if the ENTIRE reason you quit was you couldn't handle doing sales and marketing and putting yourself out there
I'm reluctant to respond because people who have social anxiety can sometimes take genuine feedback and mis-interpret it
What I'm trying to say is that the extent of the risk you took is not very high
And the reason that stuff didn't work out is your social anxiety
So just make sure you don't take the wrong feedback from what life is telling you
Lithium-based batteries (and associated tech) are to the 21st century what the internal combustion engine was to the 20th century and what the steam engine was to the 19th century.
There’s a ~90% chance you’re using a device powered by a lithium chemistry battery to read this right now (laptop or tablet or phone). The smartphone alone (enabled by lithium based batteries) has transformed the world. Lithium-based batteries have impacted public health & healthcare (e-cigs vs conventional, medical devices like insulin pump, etc), micromobility (e-scooters, e-bikes, electric wheelchairs, etc), countless accessories (smart watches, smart speakers, wireless earbuds), grid storage, electric cars, electric buses, electric trucks, electric ferries, electric rocket pumps (RocketLab), satellites, submarines, civil drones (like Zipline), and a whole bunch of things that have not yet been invented and perhaps require improved chemistry like lithium metal anode or lithium sulfur or eventually lithium-air (enabling long-haul electric flight, even supersonic flight).
For things like this article described, it will enable more expansion of form factors and reduce costs. Jet suits have been done before but equivalently-specked electric motors are much cheaper than the small, micro turbines used for projects like this. And micro turbines have such atrocious efficiency (about 4.4% for hobby turbine engines... meaning their fuel supply only has a useful specific energy of about 1.9MJ/kg or 525Wh/kg, compared to 0.5 MJ/kg for high-C-rate LiPo, 1MJ/kg for really good production Li-ion and 2MJ/kg for low C rate lithium metal anode cells and lithium sulfur) that after another few decades of battery chemistry improvement, electric microturbines not only will have punchier power but also longer duration.
There’s a ton of undeveloped opportunities out there that will be enabled by the efficiency, convenience, low-cost, high reliability, and oxygen-independence of lithium chemistry batteries.
(Though some kind of temperature sensor could be nice.)
My second rage inducing grievance is bad cleanability. All the places dirt, scuz, grime fill up. Nooks, crannies, crevices, shelves, dials, mounts.
My third grievance is bad cable management. WTF am I supposed to tuck away the power cable? How do I secure it for storage?
My Vitamix blender, mixer, hot iron, instapot, sawzall, portable fans and heaters, the pre-USB-C Mac power bricks... All piss me off on the regular.
The least cleanable product I've ever owned was a Samsung fridge. iFixit would give it a -2/10 rating. I can only conclude its designers and product manager had never seen a fridge before. Or thoroughly hated all fridge-kind and were exacting revenge as part of some enduring blood feud.
- Control: followed the current Norwegian guidelines, which recommend 30 minutes of moderate level physical activity almost every day
- High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT): Generally followed the same program as control, but two of the five sessions were instead a 10 minute warmup, followed by four four-minute intervals, working at 90% max heart rate
- Moderate Intensity Continuous Training (MICT): Generally followed the same program as control, but two of the five sessions were instead a half hour of steady-state exercise, at about 70% max heart rate
Conclusion: There was little to no difference in mortality between the control, HIIT, and MICT groups.
I don't love this study design, because it isn't really testing HIIT (or MICT); it's testing what happens when 40% of your exercise is HIIT (or MICT).
That being said, I think the most important takeaway is that exercise is good for you, and what that exercise looks like is almost completely unimportant. Do what you enjoy and can sustain. If you have ten minutes in the morning, do HIIT. If you have an hour after work and want to get out of the house, go jogging or ride a bike. Anything is better than nothing.
Although these results are not exactly impressive or compelling (they don't make me want to change my exercise habits), it's reassuring to see researchers go through with publishing underwhelming results, rather than cherry-picking only the interesting results and sitting on the rest, which is a major contributing factor to the crisis of confidence/replication in the social sciences.
What the author describes is humans living in captivity.
There is a cadre of people who argue, "really? you wouldn't survive a day outside this so-called captivity, tough guy" and then go on to justify how their various compromises are somehow moral. To me that whole line of argument is just indoors cats lecturing outdoors cats about how to manage the shame of dependency, which outdoors cats just don't have.
If we do not learn to limit the power of people who wield tech, we will become their captives. This was the whole reason to be a hacker, to act as a check on having humanity dominated by our own tech.
I would suggest a change in wording. Concurrency is not hard, its asynchronous updates that are hard. That's why digital logic circuits use a clock, and it's also why mixing logic into event driven user interfaces eventually gets out of hand.
I traveled to India last year for a business trip. Indian McD has apparently had vegetarian burger options for decades, including the McVeggie (vegetable patty), McSpicy Paneer (cottage cheese patty) and McAloo Tikki (potato-based patty).
The Indian population is about 40% vegetarian, so this makes sense. Personally, I think the vegetarian burgers tasted incredible, and I wish we had them here.
All: don't miss that there are now multiple pages of comments in this thread. To get there, click 'More' at the bottom of the earlier pages. Or like this:
(Once we've rolled out some long-suffering performance improvements, all of this should blissfully disappear, including this sort of comment. Thanks for your patience.)
You can use scrcpy (https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy) to bypass the policy if you really need to have a screenshot. All you need is to have a Linux laptop at hand, debug mode enabled, and a USB cable plugged in. Super simple stuff right? (this is satire!)
Now, I'm as frustrated as anybody else here that I'm forbidden to use whatever feature I want from MY phone, for which I paid, with MY MOENY (and nobody else's apart from mine). But then again, what choice do I have? Not buy a phone? Switch to what? There are no viable and practical alternatives. It's a "take it or leave it" situation.
All: before reading further, make sure you're up on the site guidelines and don't post political or ideological flames to this thread. If you're hot under the collar, please cool down and wait for your curiosity to come back before commenting (and maybe even reading) further. This is a good test case to see if HN can stick to its intended spirit: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: There are now multiple pages of comments in this thread. If you want to see the later pages, click 'More' at the bottom of the earlier pages. Or get there like this:
As many have pointed out, a dozen or so submissions on this topic were flagged by users. That's actually the immune system working as intended, but another component of the system is that moderators rescue the very most historic stories so HN can have a single big thread about them. We did that 4 years ago, also for Brexit, etc.
Since this was the first submission on the topic, it seems fairest to be the one to restore. (It's still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and/or lottery.)
I changed the URL from https://www.cnn.com/ since that is not the most useful link and the AP seems as close as one can get to a neutral source.
I'm currently actively working on a typechecking system for elixir (three packages: https://github.com/ityonemo/selectrix for compile-time interface, ../mavis for type logic, and ../mavis_inference for performing type inference on compiled code).
The chief difficulties I am running into are:
1) How to do intersections on functions and maps (this is in the article):
f(integer) -> integer is not usable as f(any) -> integer
2) not all of the erlang bytecode instructions are well documented
3) I still haven't figured out how to deal with circular dependencies at the module level.
Erlang makes this easy in these ways:
1) compiled module structure is simple and the way branching works makes the mechanics of type inference trivial.
2) erlangs concurrency makes dealing with, for example in-module dependencies trivial
3) there are only a handful of types in erlang so, aside from functions, their subtyping relationships are very straightforward.
Elixir makes this easy in these ways:
1) Typechecking structs can be more straightforward than records.
2) Writing a composable type logic (mavis) is super easy with elixir's protocols
3) I built (and am refining) a very easy dsl that makes creating and testing logic for the beam opcodes less of a hair-tearing experience:
I wonder when the reverse will happen. As rents in SF dive, will people that were force to outlying parts of the Bay Area return? Will younger LGBT folk be able to afford to live in/near the Castro? Will more people _not_ in tech be able to live here?
SF has felt like such a one-industry town for quite a while, and that can mute some of the richness and diversity that normally makes cities interesting (and perhaps more broadly valuable?).
If some tech workers are happier in the mountains, that's great that they can now live that life and keep their jobs. But I hope that in their places, we see a new diversity of people of range of jobs who can choose to live in a city that was previously out of reach.
I was lucky to get a pre-release version to test, and I decided to tear it down before I started trying it out. I posted this blog post with detailed pictures of the insides, and some more details and performance benchmarks: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-400-tear...
There are also a couple videos linked in the post, if you're more visually-inclined.
Fun fact: the Pi 400 (and Compute Module 4) both have newer revisions of the BCM2711 SoC (C0 instead of B0), and that's part of the reason the clock speed is higher on the Pi 400 (1.8 GHz) than on the regular Pi 4 model B (1.5 GHz)—the newer revision apparently handles faster clocks and scaling with less heat than the older revision.
Darren Owen (Dr_O) keeps Winamp updated here at the Winamp Community Update Project: https://getwacup.com/
He's been releasing new updates every few months for the last couple of years, and it's great. It's still how I use/listen to a lot of my old Media that's hard to find on streaming sites.
It also still supports the DSP plugins, a favourite of mine is Stereotool. I wish I could find a way to plug DSPs into Browsers for streaming from Youtube Music etc, but I haven't yet.
Anyway - Winamp isn't dead, it's still Whippin' the Llama's ass.
This guy is right that this redesign sabotages Gmail's bulletproof brand, but he doesn't mention the real motivation. This is Google we're talking about. They hired a new VP for these apps and since VPs are essentially useless people, he ordered up a redesign to show impact. He's even quoted in the article with some perfect nonsense that couldn't have been written anywhere but at a megacorp.
The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven, but more and more often, it seems that they release primary sources of information (especially videos) much earlier than other news outlets will, if the other news outlets do so at all.
There have been multiple times when I've seen an insane video of something happening spreading around Twitter or WorldStar or some other "raw video" aggregation site, and then I'll see it on the NY Post, and that's it. The other major news sites will only show edited versions of the raw video with their own commentary playing over it, or they won't release it at all.
As a theoretical example-
Immediately after event:
Twitter: OH MY GOD look at this kid driving a schoolbus! <35 second video of a kid driving a schoolbus>
Two hours after event:
NY Post: Child seen driving school bus <35 second video of a kid driving a schoolbus>
Twelve hours after event:
NY Times: Child Arrested for School Bus Joyride <3 minute video, containing 18 seconds of footage from original video with expert analysis diagrammed on top>
This is a Facebook communications person responding with an official reply to this incident. She describes herself as "Facebook comms, formerly @TheDemocrats and @SpeakerPelosi".
This is an example of power leakage. These institutions do in fact (i.e. de facto, not de jure) have elements of sovereign power given their relationship with the political/ruling class, it's just that they are not directly accountable in the same way that a government is. They engage in censorship for the benefit of the ruling/political class and use political formulae as a mask (TOS violations, "community standards" violations, exhortations to the first amendment, section 230 protections, etc) in the same way governments do.
This is one of the best Wikipedia entries I have read yet. Concise and relatively plain English. Clear description of benefits, shortcomings, and possible tests.
>But in the meantime, if heterosexual men are looking to get a match, it’s probably a good idea if they save showing off their photos with their favorite felines for the first or second date.
I arrived in Bali, Indonesia at the start of the pandemic with a 6 month visa. A few months in they started granting emergency extensions to anyone who wanted to stay (getting a flight home was tricky at that time, and still is).
Lots of people left but a core of nomads and expats have remained.
They have since slowly begun to dial back the giving out of emergency visa extensions but you can still get a new visa through the normal process. There are even people arriving in Bali recently, on newly-issued visas from overseas.
The scene is obviously quieter here now. There are no tourists, only nomads and retirees who live here.
I hate this sort of article. Lots of griping about the problems with YAML, but no solutions. What does the author think is better? XML doesn't map to the same data structures as YAML, JSON, and TOML, so it's not really a comparable beast.
The author mentions a desire to be able to teach a data format to people in the way someone can comprehend HTML or Markdown easily. But the formats have different goals.
The goal of HTML and Markdown are to provide a way to encode document formatting in a simple text syntax. There's not one single correct way to format a document intended for presentation to and consumption by humans. Pretty much anything goes, HTML and Markdown just provide some decoration.
But the purpose of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is to provide a way to represent strictly defined data structures for consumption by a computer. The reason YAML is frustrating is because you can't fudge the result; you can't be sloppy or inexact; YAML operates at the boundary between the human and the computer program, and just like any HCI, it's going to be frustrating and error-prone.
Now, would it be possible to come up with a better format than YAML or JSON or TOML that does the same thing? Maybe. But the facts that tools exist to search and manipulate these formats and that we'll probably still be using them in 2030 isn't evidence that they are bad. The fact that yq can exist and is useful is a point in favor of YAML, imo. If simple tools can be written to do useful things with a data format, that makes the format more useful.
> I remember as a graduate student that Ingrid Daubechies frequently referred to convolution by a bump function as "blurring" - its effect on images is similar to what a short-sighted person experiences when taking off his or her glasses (and, indeed, if one works through the geometric optics, convolution is not a bad first approximation for this effect). I found this to be very helpful, not just for understanding convolution per se, but as a lesson that one should try to use physical intuition to model mathematical concepts whenever one can.
> More generally, if one thinks of functions as fuzzy versions of points, then convolution is the fuzzy version of addition (or sometimes multiplication, depending on the context). The probabilistic interpretation is one example of this (where the fuzz is a a probability distribution), but one can also have signed, complex-valued, or vector-valued fuzz, of course.
[0] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/5892/what-is-convolution-...