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proofofconcept | 3 months ago | on: How many video games include a marriage proposal? At least one

Reminds me of this vid by a guy who did a romhack of Chrono Trigger to propose to his then-gf who was playing through it for the first time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_HMLvLB7b0 "I proposed by hacking Chrono Trigger (Oct 24, 2008, 6m 57s)"

He writes in the description about what he was going for as far as making it seem like part of the actual game while still referencing their romantic history, and how well it worked (good for them!).

proofofconcept | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Shouldn't web browsers ask us before storing cookies?

As I remember it, this was an option you could enable in Netscape Navigator back in the dialup days. In practice it meant that every time you went to a new website you'd have to click ok on a dozen popup menus asking for permission to store each individual cookie before the page would load. I'm sure there are ways to make that process go a little more smoothly but in practice it's still probably something that most users would immediately turn right off.

proofofconcept | 6 years ago | on: From automatic differentiation to message passing [video]

>there is a follow up paper to the DL via Hessian-free optimization paper by James Martens that develops a variant of AD which calculates a special curvature quantity which is useful for efficient second order optimization

Deep Learning via Hessian-free Optimization: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jmartens/docs/Deep_HessianFree.pd...

Optimizing Neural Networks with Kronecker-factored Approximate Curvature: http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05671

James Martens' list of publications with links to sample code for the above two papers, slides/condensed conference versions, etc: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jmartens/research.html

Pretty neat stuff

proofofconcept | 7 years ago | on: Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless

If zero rating wasn't allowed then the ISP would still be doing that sort of thing with popular content providers anyway, just the ones that their users prefer instead of the ones their users are being railroaded onto by the ISP itself, so as far as I'm concerned it's a wash.

proofofconcept | 7 years ago | on: Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless

This is putting the cart before the horse. Competition is what drives down prices. When companies aren't allowed to zero rate content then they're all offering more or less the same product so they have to compete with each other on price.

Also keep in mind that zero rating is itself an explicit admission that network capacity and overhead aren't factors in the price. The whole deal is that the wireless company lets customers on those plans use unlimited data at no extra charge as long as it's for zero rated content. Allowing customers at that same price point to use that same unlimited data without arbitrary restrictions would ultimately be just as profitable.

proofofconcept | 7 years ago | on: Analyze a Soccer Game Using Tensorflow Object Detection and OpenCV (2018)

These problems are all tractable using traditional computer vision methods. There's a sizable body of published academic research from the past couple of decades that addresses tackling these and other computer vision problems in the specific applied context of video analysis of soccer games. Considering the amount of knowledge out there I'm kind of surprised that any clubs at the premier league level are still in a position where they aren't able to extract useful information from their library of game footage. With so much money at stake I figured that even if clubs weren't developing their own analytics tools in-house there would be no shortage of third party tools out there by now.

>I have people inside a Premier League club just waiting for me to be able to throw OpenCV at an archive of video

How extensive is the footage in their archives? i.e. is it just what winds up in the broadcasts, do they keep every second of footage of every game taken by every camera in the stadium, or is it something in-between?

proofofconcept | 7 years ago | on: Senior House at MIT Dies, and a Crisis Blooms at Colleges (2017)

>But groups like Senior House, which define themselves by being different, also run the risk of becoming highly conformist, Packer says. The punk rock movement is a particularly vivid example of this phenomenon. “They self-describe as being different, but from the outside they all look the same,” he says.

They don't want to look different from each other; they want to look different from people like him. It's really not that complicated. Spinning that into alarmism against the idea countercultures in general like this guy does is just ridiculous, and there's absolutely no way he's doing so in good faith.

proofofconcept | 9 years ago | on: Why you should bet big on privacy

I'm glad that the general public is growing more aware of privacy issues but the more cynical part of my brain tells me that, since the government and a very large industry share an interest in eroding privacy as much as possible, putting stronger privacy protections into place won't be easy no matter how many people say that's what they want. I want to feel confident betting on privacy, I really do, but I won't until I see some evidence that growing public awareness is getting politicians to address privacy issues directly instead of brushing them aside to focus on other, politically sexier issues.

proofofconcept | 10 years ago | on: Dune, 50 years on

If you've already sloged through Dune Messiah and Children of Dune then you should consider giving God Emperor of Dune a chance because it's very different from the first two sequels. The setting has dramatically changed, so there is a lot of new worldbuilding; the overall narrative shifts to focus on a new central character; there is a return to the more philosophical content of the original as opposed to the strictly expository content of the first two sequels; and the writing itself is (in my opinion) much more lovingly crafted than the prose in the first two sequels which seemed to me as a reader as if it was rushed like he just wanted to spit it out and be done with that part of the narrative. I know I'm really just evangelizing on the basis of my personal reaction to the books but again, if you've alrady read the first two sequels, pop into a Barnes and Noble or something and give the first few chapters of God Emperor a chance.

proofofconcept | 10 years ago | on: Dune, 50 years on

Which (if any) of the Dune sequels are "good" is one of those Kirk vs. Pickard or Joel vs. Mike caliber sci-fi debates that gets unreasonably heated since people get very attached to their opinions on creative works that resonate with them on a personal level. (For the record, I don't really like the first two sequels but I really really love the 3rd-5th sequels; I realize it's a big ask of new readers to get that far just on my say-so though.)

proofofconcept | 10 years ago | on: Dune, 50 years on

I've heard people say they find inspiration in the Litany Against Fear (Fear is the mind-killer...) but I prefer the stripped-down version introduced in the 5th sequel: "Face your fears or they will climb over your back."

proofofconcept | 12 years ago | on: Zappos says goodbye to bosses

Labels are important to the way people think and the word "manager" has inherited a lot of baggage from American corporate culture at large. Giving the position they are trying to define a new name isn't wrong-headed if what they are trying to do is avoid a clash between the attitude they want their "lead links " to have towards employees and the attitudes attached to the title "manager" that people may otherwise import into those relationships (not to mention qualifications, compensation, etc). This isn't to say that it will take, or lead to the results they want if it does, but I can see how starting from scratch would look easier to the Zappos executives than fighting against a ingrained cultural expectations would.

proofofconcept | 12 years ago | on: NSA speaks out on Snowden, spying [video]

At the very least, it's encouraging that the NSA feels the need to do keep up this sort of damage control because it suggests that people in the agency feel its public image continues to be damaged (or at least threatened) by the leaks. I doubt they would be actively trying to massage public opinion like this if the story had died by now, or if only a negligible portion of the public cared.

proofofconcept | 12 years ago | on: Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram

When I see "experiment X backs up/supports/proves conclusion Y" in a headline I always mentally correct it to "experiment X does not definitively disprove conclusion Y" where X and Y are random variables operating on whatever the actual scientific experiment and conclusion respectively are.

proofofconcept | 12 years ago | on: How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique

If you actually want to have a discussion of those differences then you're going to need to point them out yourself instead of dumping a homework assignment in everyone's lap since: 1) I don't read Chinese, and I doubt I'm alone here when it comes to that 2) Google translate is far from perfect, and unless the differences are clear to someone who merely gets the gist of the Chinese article they probably won't come across
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