Having traveled to several countries without formal addresses, this looks like a godsend for navigation. It has no regional segmentation (i.e. no drill-down reference like country-state-zip-city levels), however, so it's useless as a cultural reference.
Slightly off topic, but I'm stupefied at how much faster TomTom's maps (and Bing, apparently!) are than GoogleMaps.
The technology Jenison relies on can replicate art, but it does so synthetically, with no understanding of art's inner life
What a bunch of rhetorical diarrhea. This was nothing more than an exercise in curiosity, an exploration and evaluation of a hypothesis. This was not an attempt to disprove Vermeer's creativity, disprove artists in general, or disprove art.
I haven't done the math, but seeing the chapels in Cappadocia, Turkey seems to prove this. Most of the chapels contain frescoes that are significantly color-faded, but Karanlık Kilise ("Dark Church"), which is quite dim and has very little ambient light, contains frescoes with far richer color. [1]
Unfortunately, the guards stationed there like to yell at tourists even if their flashes are off, so I suspect most people don't understand the reasoning.
For what it's worth Buildasofa.com in the US seems to be making custom more affordable. I can't speak to the quality as I haven't ordered anything, but several friends speak highly of them and I believe their prices are far below the $5k number being thrown around.
Almost all DSLRs and I assume many point-and shoots have an automatic focus tracking mode for moving subjects. Canon's is called AI servo. That said, most people don't move beyond the "auto" setting on their high-end cameras, so I can understand the quest to simplify.
Autofocus in smartphones will hopefully get better over time, but if your options are an overall superior DSLR or an equally large camera that just gives you some flexible (albeit one-dimensional) focusing benefits then I think the choice is clear. Practice a little more with your DSLR and wait to see if Lytro can be implanted into a better supporting cast of parts at a reasonable cost.
As much as I dislike the stereotypical criticism on HN I agree completely. I still don't know what problem Lytro is trying to solve or what benefit it provides, and I've yet to hear about a successful application in the consumer space. Refocusing after a picture has been taken is interesting, but useless unless your camera/phone/whatever doesn't focus properly.
Depth of field is just one of many tools used to convey a photograph. For $1500 this camera better blow away other prosumer point-and-shoots like the RX100 Mk II, RX10, Ricoh GR, etc. Given the cost of light-field technology I suspect compromises in sensor sensitivity, dynamic range, and ISO will have to be made.
1. That origin is just urban legend. Americanos started in the 70's.
2. Per ounce, you're technically correct about the strength of espresso vs. drip/brewed coffee. But brews have variable strengths, and most Americans drink 12, 18, and 24 ounce drip coffees (which ends up being more caffeine than even a quad shot of espresso).
Your inference was incorrect. I said my job was to keep our sales reps from making false promises, which includes (but is not limited to) bending the truth, lying by omission, making incorrect assertions, etc.
My industry is highly mobile and quite competitive so we don't gain anything by stretching truths. Customers can leave as quickly as they come, and since we're a small shop we use a consultative sales approach to ensure customers will be happy long-term.
Again, the solution is more complex than "just tell the truth." Tell the truth in a positive way, offer viable alternatives, and re-emphasize what matters. We're selling to humans, not Vulcans.
I deal with this everyday selling software, and it's much more complex than being truthful and lying.
My job as a technical consultant to our sales staff is to bridge the gap between needs assessment and salesmanship. I have a 0 tolerance policy about lying during sales (I have to be to keep our sales guys from making false promises), but I struggle with finding that delicate balance between the truth, focusing on what's important to a prospect, and the manner in which you talk about capabilities you don't have. You cannot simply tell a prospect you don't have a feature if they don't actually need it because there's a lot of psychology at play. A competitor told them they needed that feature so you now have to mitigate their concerns. You essentially need to find a way to be truthful while simultaneously transferring emphasis to your selling points or to their needs.
I had a similarly poor experience[1]. Many people are retorting that you have to go through this process with all financial institutions. To those, I say you're missing the point. We still have to answer a lot of questions regarding regulation around cryptocurrencies, but part of the allure is that you shouldn't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to use bitcoin. Furthermore, the first (and only) time I dropped by the bitcoin markup was astronomical.
It's naive to think we'll resolve this overnight, but until then there's no point to using a robocoin ATM.
The flipside of this is that Walmart does not charge extra for small, individual items, and I suspect they're losing a lot of money by doing so. I'm a heavy Amazon user, but as an experiment (and because I needed some individual toiletries) I ordered ~15 items from Walmart.com. Walmart's answer to this shipment request was to send 5 separate packages from different places and taking anywhere from 1 day to 10 days. Shipping transit estimations were all off. One shipment was just a single loofah. Just a very annoying process altogether.
Even with these add-on products Amazon is basically forcing you to adopt a Costco / buy-in-bulk model, and I think it's the only profitable and sensible direction.
From the article and throughout the comments here it seems Backblaze prefers cheaper drives over a few percentage points of reliability. It would be interesting to see some data showing the tradeoff, but I suspect it reveals too much of their operation. At first glance it appears you can get a drive with .9% failure rate (HGST 7K3000) for $127[1], and yet BB really likes the WD Red, which has a higher failure rate (3.2%) and cost[2].
What might shed light without revealing too much is information about where they source drives today (their sourcing coverage during the shortage was very cool!). I suspect they're finding some nice bulk discounts somewhere.
Psychoacoustics are still very much apart of the audiophile world; although, the internet has helped reduce the hype to some degree. People believe whatever they perceive and aren't inherently objective.
A/B tests do crop up from time to time in various audio / video communities (AVS and some car audio forums hold some pretty objective events) but science doesn't always provide an answer people want to accept.
Coinbase handled the recent surge in traffic pretty poorly. When prices tanked / fluctuated heavily, they turned off the ability to buy citing "a lack of bitcoin" and told users they could put in buy orders now for the market price on Friday or Monday. Two days later when the price is back up to ~$700 you can mysteriously buy again.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but USD liquidity has been extraordinarily frustrating over the past several days since most exchanges are foreign (and US bank wires take days to weeks).
Can any artists on HN comment on how useful styli are with tips this thick? I suspect the added thickness is required for capacitive touch screens, but I always thought my fingertip was far too thick for accurately initiating thin lines or dots (e.g. in games like Draw Something). Something like this seems like it would require far less erasing:
So far I've seen "you can't print this out!" (who cares?) and "some of the transitions could be smoother!"
This one is my favorite:
"This isn't a one-page form. It's not going to fit on my desk. I'm going to pass on this candidate."
Seriously people? You think this guy doesn't have a hard copy of his resume? Your goal is to hire a talented candidate. This exercise demonstrates talent, and was created for exposure. Not optimization of communication in the form of a one-page CV that will end up decomposing on some hiring manager's desk that doesn't have the decency to reply to candidates he or she will not be hiring.
My first thought would be to scoff at your criticism. Would the birds' travel patterns be any less impressive if they were resting for very short periods during these 200 days? The sensor measures acceleration, so the only potential confusion might be with light movement near ground / trees.
But according to another study, some migratory birds rest for only seconds at a time during their flights:
At 4-minute intervals over 200 days, you have 72,000 datapoints. There are 1,920,000 9-second intervals (avg nap period from other article) over 200 days, so given their data collection spans only 3.75% of this time there's a chance they missed one of these naps.
I have almost hit several emergency vehicles during the day due to my car's sound dampening and my car stereo (which doesn't have to be loud to block out sirens). At night, this has never happened because I have never not seen the seizure-inducing lights. My sample size may be less than a hundred, but you're making an assumption that piercing sirens at night are the most effective way to alert the public of an emergency. And for those blind pedestrians, low-frequency (or even lower decibel) sirens are more than sufficient.
I live on the 9th floor of a condo building that unfortunately has single-pane windows. If I don't have an extremely loud fan blowing, I will be woken up by everything from emergency vehicles to motorcyclists. I realize this comes with the territory of living in a city, but if cosmopolitan cities like Geneva can incorporate effective noise pollution laws* then there's room to improve.
Porting CUDA-based research, debugging, and overall experimentation speed is likely slower.
The GPU is still king for training.