guycook · HackerTrans

guycook

no profile record

Submissions

What reporter Will Ockenden's metadata reveals about his life

abc.net.au

2 pointsby guycook11 yıl önce0 comments

The danger of letting the gaming industry curate its own history

gamasutra.com

4 pointsby guycook11 yıl önce0 comments

Illegal service UberX outsmarts transport inspectors, disrupting stings

abc.net.au

7 pointsby guycook12 yıl önce0 comments

Aus Government 'seeking metadata', not targeting people's browsing history

abc.net.au

2 pointsby guycook12 yıl önce2 comments

Zero to GLSL Spectrum Analyser in One Hour

ivorydungeon.net

3 pointsby guycook13 yıl önce0 comments

comments

5 yıl öncediscuss

There's already an attempt at doing this on PC [0] led by Brian Fargo of Interplay / inXile fame. I can't speak to how effective it is or how many people use it but it seems to be still operative after a year on public beta.

One key issue I see is that it's still quite centralised - you have to resell through their store and can't just exchange a game license for crypto at an arbitrary price. No surprise though that this is a necessary step on the way to getting publishers on board.

[0] https://store.robotcache.com/

6 yıl öncediscuss

The NZ renting experience can best be described as punitive, and for foreigners coming here can be quite a shock at what it entails (no pets [0], no hanging pictures, short-notice no-fault eviction, good luck getting plumbing and electric fixed, etc. etc.). But relevant to this discussion is the extremely poor state of the housing stock. It is woeful beyond belief.

The house I rent is in a town with median household (i.e. avg of 1.5 earners) income of US$44,000, and my rent is US$1,100/month. One of the inclusions in that cost is what I call the "mould room", which is not just uninhabitable but I don't dare even enter it without a mask [1]. I run a dehumidifier in my kids room for 14hrs/day or they would cough all night in bed - it sucks about 4L moisture per day. But I put up with that because my landlord hasn't put up rent too much (is about 15% behind market at the moment) and the alternatives that come on the market are scarcely any better.

Lest you think I'm being dramatic or that my situation isn't generalisable, I suggest you read this recent reddit thread of NZ renters detailing how cold their houses are [2]. Particularly funny are comments from Norwegian, Swedish, Canadian migrants saying they've never felt as cold in their life as in a New Zealand bedroom.

The only way out of this situation is to buy your own house. That's it. There is no incentive whatsoever for landlords to improve their capital once someone is paying off their mortgage, and covid slowdown notwithstanding, that is guaranteed to be the case due to extreme supply shortage.

Perhaps you were confused by my use of the phrase "capital into real estate" - that doesn't mean building more and certainly never means improving existing stock - it just means buying the same existing houses for more and more money each year. The effect of this, of course, is that people renting these houses have to save more each year for a deposit if they ever hope to own. In this town, in the last 12 months, if you saved anything less than US$12,000 towards your deposit you are now further away from owning a bottom quartile house than last August. It is now estimated that for those born after 1990 (everyone < 30 yrs old) ~60% will never own, because their disposable income will never cover a deposit. So those people will be putting up with cold, expensive, diseased housing for life.

OneRoof, being a real estate advertising company, makes its money on listings priced based on the value of property, and so want to see both higher prices and/or higher turnover. Against typical microecon thinking, these factors are correlated in NZ, so in short all they want to see is higher prices. In other words they make more money the harder it is for renters to escape the cold, and thus put out an endless stream of PR guff about rags-to-riches stories of people flipping houses, hoping (and often succeeding) that 'serious' news outlets like the NZ Herald run the stories uncritically.

That is why "cats are warm lol" is so offensive coming from them.

[0] Adding further insult in the context of this article

[1] If you're wondering why I haven't put in a solution for this - it's a hilly town and this room is embedded in the Earth up to about half way, a not uncommon feature around here. Since it wasn't waterproofed properly, it's about as moist as a rainforest in there, and the only fix would be knocking two walls down and rebuilding that whole section of house.

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/i9h2r1/i_just_w...

6 yıl öncediscuss

Sorry to be the downer on this article, but if you head to oneroof's "news" page [0] you'll see their entire raison d'être is to push out articles for NZ's media outlets to reproduce in the hopes of encouraging the continued misallocation of capital into residential real estate. So them making light of the house heating situation is in extremely poor taste considering such issues as NZ being the only developed country in the world with significant instances of rheumatic fever [1] and a quarter of South Island renters being stuck with cold and mouldy accommodation [2] (which they couldn't leave for weeks due to the pandemic).

[0] https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/latest-news

[1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/122260447/we-have-to...

[2] https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/queenstown/warmth-issue-25-ren...

9 yıl öncediscuss

> laws-of-physics limitation

This is only true if you limit your AR HMD design to beamsplitter + projector. There are existing prototypes [1] which demonstrate quite accurate lcd based occlusion for darkening the environment on a per-hmd-pixel basis.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3041178

9 yıl öncediscuss

I think my manner of speaking was too wry. To be clear: I'm perfectly happy for people to read my research by whatever means they need to take. I too hope that scientific publishing gets its act together and moves away from hoarding knowledge behind paid subscriptions, and guerilla efforts to bring that closer to reality are appreciated. It was a tongue in cheek way of saying "I'm right here, you could have asked :)" (I would have said 'go for it')

To answer some of the sibling comments:

rspeer > You get no actual benefit from IEEE making money off of your article, right?

I'm well aware, although as an IEEE member I don't think it's fair to say no benefit, although it is very hard to quantify.

klibertp > what difference it makes for you personally, as an author and researcher, whether people access your work via a paywall or not?

None. As said above, I think my tenor wasn't communicated well enough. I was more just surprised that, given that sillysaurus3 and I have never communicated before, someone would take an action that could have potentially been quite upsetting (I know a few researchers where that would have definitely been the case).

klibertp > Does that mean it's the authors who pay publishers to get their work published? Is that really true? And then publishers also charge readers for what they were paid to publish in the first place?

Absolutely not in our field. As I understand it, in some fields there is a charge for very long form writing to cover the work required in reviewing and editing (though perversely the actual person who does that work is often unpaid), but generally pay-to-publish would indicate a low quality journal and would be an outlet of last resort.

9 yıl öncediscuss

Whilst I am certainly supportive of open access science in general, and in the case of my own writing am glad to see it reach a wider audience, I'm surprised by the brazenness of linking to a pirated article whilst in discussion with its author. I don't know whether to be offended or impressed

9 yıl öncediscuss

Have you used any optical see-through HMDs? There's heaps, and they all have no problem displaying text. If you look at the spec sheet for the BT-300 for example [0] you'll see "Virtual screen size: 80" support (virtual viewing distance 5m)", or in other words you need to focus your eyes five meters away to see the display sharply, at which point it will appear to take up 80in of diagonal space in the real world (don't know why they mixed the units like this though). I'm pretty sure most people could read text off a 720p 80" screen 5m away.

As for not making things dark, yes that's true. You can of course tint the glasses or use an extra layer to darken the outside world, or you can really crank the brightness causes the user's iris to contract creating the impression of higher contrast in the dark regions. Best option is to combine the approaches with a camera observing the environment, which can even be done on a per-pixel basis as in the paper I helped write [1]

As for power/performance, it's all a matter of desired form factor. If you don't mind a cable to an arm or hip attached android device, you can have everything you need right now. Alternatively there's the Hololens style huge headset. But if you want slimline glasses yes you'll be waiting a few years.

A lot a people are bearish on the future of AR and I can appreciate that viewpoint, but the arguments you've brought for it are at best half true and I hope readers don't see this and think any of these problems are unsolvable (or indeed, haven't already been solved)

[0] https://tech.moverio.epson.com/en/bt-300/ [1] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7523376/

9 yıl öncediscuss

Sounds like an interesting place, I loved Isle of Skye when I travelled that area. I think the article might be overselling the "leading the world in energy" angle though -- I too live on an island where > 98% of the energy is from renewable sources [1], and it has over a million people on it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Island#Energy

9 yıl öncediscuss

Epictetus, Stoic philosopher says:

"Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions — in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing."

From that I take away, whether the universe proves to be a well-meaning entity or a bleak, chaotic, meaningless one, it is not useful^ to attempt to discern its motivations except to the extent you can affect them. As you noted, it is up to you to determine then what really is or isn't in your control.

^ note that this is distinct from the idea of intellectual exploration for your own enjoyment or edification

9 yıl öncediscuss

And if compile times are getting you down, you can still get the checks without producing a binary and save quite a bit of time with https://github.com/rsolomo/cargo-check

10 yıl öncediscuss

If you haven't tried ConEmu [0], it's pretty awesome. I use it with the Git Bash that comes with the full windows git installer and it Just Works for most of my terminal needs. Haven't tried it with WSL but it can most likely be rigged up.

[0] https://conemu.github.io/

10 yıl öncediscuss

Correct. I can't find the exact news article I read it, though this one shows the trend [0]. The most recent HILDA report shows that over 50% of < 30s in Aus will never own a home

[0] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-20/five-facts-which-show-...

10 yıl öncediscuss

> But at least one of these videos — showing an alien invader game that let the wearer of the supposed headset or glasses make use of real-world objects — was created by visual effects studio Weta Workshop. Prior to today, it was believed Weta had simply created the visual assets for the game. However, The Information reveals the entire video was created by the studio.

Was this ever really in doubt? You don't have to be a physicist or AR expert to note that throughout the video they occlude bright background colours with dark AR elements - somehow projecting 'black light'. Whilst I wouldn't expect the man on the street to pick this up it would be nice if journalists about to pen a breathless puff piece would at least give the subject matter 30 seconds of consideration.

10 yıl öncediscuss

I know exactly what you mean. "Half" "of" "my" "searches" "look" "like" "this" "these" "days". I can understand throwing out one of many keywords when I'm down on page 6, but when I search with only 4 terms and the very first result has 2 words s̶t̶r̶u̶c̶k̶ o̶u̶t̶ I start to wonder who exactly this search box is for.

10 yıl öncediscuss

We have a setup that combines ToF, structured light and multiple colour cameras to reconstruct hands from the elbow down. Short version: it's a massive pain in the ass. In fact the setup really only works because we have a preconceived motion model (particular hand gestures) and have carefully arranged the scene to avoid interference. I'm unaware of a general solution where you can just throw more cameras in and get better scene data.

One neat thing though you might want to look at: if all you have is structured light (ie Kinect v1) you can simply attach a vibrating motor to each emitter/receiver to avoid a lot of interference per [0]

[0] https://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~maimone/media/kinect_VR_2012.pdf

10 yıl öncediscuss

Spare a thought for us Cooks of the world. Four letters, a noun and a verb...

After the gTLD explosion I thought I could finally snare a decent one but they all went into the $1000+ category immediately, excepting niches like cook.republican, cook.accountant etc.

Luckily some did eventually come down, I managed to get cook.run for a more reasonable $50/year

10 yıl öncediscuss

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

10 yıl öncediscuss

> I suppose a case could be made that people are entitled to a share of the success that they didn't help provide, but no one ever even tries to make it.

Ha! If you genuinely want to hear people (very passionately) make this argument, try proposing a higher estate tax

10 yıl öncediscuss

I've never mined coal, but I did fly-in/fly-out work at coal mines surveying, and compared to coding it had the following benefits:

  - way better pay (not everywhere pays developers like the US)
  - kept me in shape
  - I slept a lot better during that job
  - satisfaction of jobs completed (no maintenance for topo data)
  - no micromanagment, open plan offices, daily stand-ups
  - predictable, stable working hours
  - etc. etc.

I don't do it now - 10 days out of every 14 is too long for me to stay away from my family - so I guess in the end the bad outweighed the good. But I just want to make the point that it's easy to assume that building boring CRUD apps is the best road to go down if you too quickly dismiss the other paths that can be taken.

10 yıl öncediscuss

If they knew about it, sure. All it would take is a 3 step (after initial download) instructional with some screenshots:

1. Open Explorer where you downloaded youtube-dl

2. Shift+Right click -> Open command window here

3. Type 'youtube-dl <space>' and paste url[0], then enter

As I said it really is a discoverability problem, one that the organiser of the world's information is neither incentivised nor really expected to address.

[0] ok, this is a pain pre Win 10, but ^V is supported now