Chromozon
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1 year ago
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on: Show HN: I made a git rebase TUI editor
My job follows this, and "rebase" isn't even in the vocabulary at work. It's just so simple- our developers spend zero time with git issues because there aren't any. The master branch history ends up being a sequence of pull requests that all have a corresponding code review. Everything stays nice and tidy.
Chromozon
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5 years ago
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on: $1,944 for a coronavirus test? Readers helped us spot an unusual trend
Chromozon
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5 years ago
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on: New Federal Court Rulings Find Geofence Warrants Unconstitutional
How is this any different than having the police go from business to business asking for security camera footage, analyzing the footage over a time period, connecting faces to names, and then going out and questioning those people? Both seem to be ways of tracking who is in an area at a given time, but geofencing is a significantly more efficient method.
Chromozon
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5 years ago
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on: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus
My mother would not let me live at home while I went to college specifically for this reason. She commuted to school and worked a part-time off-campus job. She regrets that she missed out on a true college experience and did not want the same for me.
Chromozon
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5 years ago
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on: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
I remember reading an article years ago which explained that the reason people get eyestrain from a white background is that the monitor's brightness is set way too high. With high brightness, the monitor acts as a light shining directly at you all day. Instead, you want it to be more like paper- low light emission but still readable due to contrast. At the time, I was using dark mode heavily, but I was still having bad eye strain. I tried lowering the brightness of the monitor, and the problem went away. Since then, I've only used light mode with a low brightness setting of 30 out of 100.
I encourage people to experiment with it. Note, if you are not used to low brightness, the monitor will look incredibly dim. But your eyes will adjust quickly- mine only took a few minutes.
Chromozon
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5 years ago
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on: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
I went to Vanderbilt and graduated in 2013. Their financial aid covered everything up to what FAFSA said my parents could afford- the EFC (expected family contribution) value. Tuition+room/board at the time was $56k, and EFC was $8k, so Vanderbilt covered the full 48k difference with no loans.
Vanderbilt has a very large endowment, and there is a lot of money earmarked for financial aid. I received $30k+ in scholarships that I never personally applied for, and I was able to graduate without loans.
On the flip side, if the EFC is very high and your family cannot afford it, you will have to get loans from another source.
Chromozon
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6 years ago
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on: Launch HN: Visual One (YC W20) – Event recognition for security cameras
Seems very similar to Camio (
https://camio.com/) but targeted at the consumer space. I like the clever wrapping of object recognition and motion detection into real world actions- "dog getting on couch". I think this can do well in the consumer space.
It's hard to bring this technology to enterprise because there are already large companies offering similar video analytics capabilities combined with complete video management solutions. See Axis, Briefcam, Milestone, Gorilla, Agent Vi. And a lot of the VMS first companies have integrations with a spread of analytics companies. You really don't want to spend your dev time creating yet another VMS. Work on being able to integrate easily with others.
One huge advantage I see with you guys is that you can do everything in the cloud. Most of the industry analytics companies require dedicated hardware or servers with GPUs. But, these companies are targeting large installations- 100s-1000s of cameras across multiple sites. Your technology might work great for 1-2 residential cameras, but I'm not sure how much it can scale to industry.
Best of luck, anyways! I like the concept.
Chromozon
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6 years ago
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on: Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says
I have followed ADVChina for quite some time. The creators provide a unique lens into Chinese culture that is hard to find elsewhere. They are very open about talking about Chinese culture and why it is the way it is. They talk about what they like and don't like about the culture but not in a racist way. The titles of their Youtube videos are click-baity, but the content is informative.
Chromozon
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6 years ago
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on: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
For those that don't know, SCAR is a scripting IDE. It was originally created for Runescape, but it can easily be used for many other games or automated tasks. Scripts are written in the Pascal programming language (super old school!). The IDE provides the ability to focus on windows, track screen coordinates, and get pixel color values. There is a large standard library of functions- MoveMouse(), ClickMouse(), FindBitmap(), FindColor(), TypeKeys('asdf')- basically all the building blocks necessary to emulate human input. There are probably better scripting IDEs out there nowadays, but back then, this was one of the best.
Chromozon
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7 years ago
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on: Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are useless
A while ago, I talked with some guys from a blockchain technology company. They are doing mostly prototyping work for a variety of companies in different industries. However, one of the devs said that most of the problems they have been asked to solve could easily be done with a simple SQL database + logging. But since blockchain is the new, cool technology, everyone wants to be using it.
I think blockchain has a lot of potential, but I haven't seen many companies really grasp how to use it correctly.
Chromozon
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7 years ago
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on: Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
Chromozon
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8 years ago
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on: Neopets HTML Guide
Chromozon
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8 years ago
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on: Women would lose $4.6B in earned tips if ‘tip stealing’ rule is finalized
Chromozon
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8 years ago
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on: High-Level Problems with Git and How to Fix Them
TFS is great if everything in your codebase is a Visual Studio project. If you are trying to use it for other things, there are better version control systems out there.
My ranking is Perforce > Git > TFS > SVN. I haven't used Mercurial. I like Perforce the best because of its clean UI, its explicit checkout mechanism (all files are read-only by default, and you have to check out anything before you can edit), the integration tool GUI, and the ability to cloud-save work without submitting it. TFS is nice because it has built-in code review, but the UI isn't nearly as clean as Perforce.
Chromozon
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8 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
Some of the best Runescape bots were all written in SCAR (
https://scar-divi.com/). A friend of mine used them for months at a time all on one character to get 99 in many skills. He was never caught and never banned. The scripts were very sophisticated- human style mouse movement, mouse clicks, random event solvers, etc.
Chromozon
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8 years ago
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on: Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history
I had the same situation, and I ended up buying the 1 TB plan. I really wish they would have an intermediate tier between 10 GB and 1 TB. I would gladly pay for 100-200 GB. I use Dropbox to back up important documents but not everything I have on my machines, so I'm still using way less than the 1 TB right now.
Chromozon
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8 years ago
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on: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs
I also use a small amount of tabs, usually under ten. When I want to go to something, I want to immediately be able to click it without having to spend time searching for it. Sometimes I watch over coworkers' shoulders as they are navigating their browsers, and they definitely spend a significant amount of time looking through tabs trying to find what they need. There is a terrible, visible lag time between asking them to navigate to a certain page and them actually being able to find and go to the correct tab. Maybe my coworkers are just inefficient at managing large amounts of tabs, but I have yet to see someone who is.
Having fewer tabs might also keep one more focused because there is only so much in front of you at a time. You don't have to process through a bunch of data that is unrelated to the current task at hand.
Chromozon
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9 years ago
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on: Cello – A library that brings higher level programming to C
This is a great example of how many of the things in C that don't compile in C++ are horrible programming practices, and it's really nice that C++ doesn't allow such garbage.
Chromozon
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9 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What insight was key to growth of your career or startup?
My seventh grade teacher strongly enforced #1. Parents would complain to her all day long that their kid spent a lot of hours on so-and-so assignment only to receive an average grade. Her response was always that she did not care how much time was spent on an assignment- if the end result was crap, you were not going to get a good grade.
Chromozon
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9 years ago
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on: How a robot got Super Mario 64 and Portal “running” on an SNES
The way they did it was a bit confusing. They were playing Zelda, and then they cut the game off right as they walked through a door. Shortly after, Super Mario N64 popped up on the center of the screen. Twitch chat wondered if they were still playing Zelda and playing SM64 through the Zelda game. It wasn't clear what was going on, and they saved the explanation until the very end.
