translocation's comments

This is a creative art project. Obviously, it doesn't work, and cannot work as designed. Most consumer night-vision cameras emit near-infrared light with LEDs at around 750-900nm, which is the wavelength this spaulder is designed to pick up. This is the same wavelength of EM radiation your TV remote uses. If your phone camera does not have a filter for IR light, you can see this kind of radiation as a white glow through your phone.

Cameras generally emit IR only while in darkness. Sunlight, or even incandescent lightbulbs, will emit so much infrared light that any nearby security cameras would be blotted out.

A functional 'security spaulder' device would need to be far more complex. Maybe a combination of IR, network packets, and other indicators would work.

A GPU (or a cluster of GPUs) might be able to process, say, 10,000 frames in one second. This does not mean that the same GPUs can process one frame in (1/10,000) of a second.

Even with an infinite number of parallel GPUs, there will be an amount of latency required in copying memory to the GPU, running a job, and copying it back. After the frame is compressed, sent over the network, and picked up by the client, further delay (possibly tens of milliseconds) is added on before pixels appear on the screen.

See the discussion around John Carmack's superuser post: http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fas...

I might not fully understand the use cases of multiple cursors, but if you were trying to accomplish the same thing (change every other occurrence of "item" to "item odd") in vim, you could do it with 'n' and '.'

    /item        (search for 'item')
    cwitem odd^C (replace with the new text)
    nn.nn.nn.    (next occurrence, next occurrence, repeat last command)

In the US, the top 1% own 35% of the country's total wealth.

Haha, just won- and the algorithm happened to be one that was posted on the front page of HN earlier this week! It just goes to show, there's no reason to get work done when you can be reading articles on HN- it could turn out to be important.

But I have to say, I haven't heard of Quixey before- it looks like they're building a search engine for software. Are they just trying to replace platform-specific app markets, or is it something trickier than that?

"Mr. Bo went to Oxford University... The current cost of that is about £26,000 a year. His current studies at Harvard's Kennedy School cost about $70,000 a year... A question raised by this prestigious overseas education... is how it was paid for."

I agree with the article's sentiment. That said, would the Wall Street Journal express similar outrage at the son of an American senator attending Oxford? What about the daughter of a German finance minister? Is it really surprising that a wealthy, well-connected Chinese kid went to school at Oxford? I have to wonder just how unbiased the author is.

If I'm not mistaken, the linked article employs the rhetorical device known as sarcasm.

The point being that Timeline is not, in fact, a world-changing feature.

I would argue that ELIZA, and the chatbots that have been programmed since, are not solutions to the Turing test.

Have you ever tried holding an actual conversation with a chatbot? They almost invariably fail the real-life Turing test within two or three messages. They parse natural language incorrectly, they can't keep track of the topic of conversation, and they often reply with non-sequitor errors.

Certainly, chatbots can appear to act with intelligence in certain situations. Given enough back-and-forth communication, however, a human will always realize that the bot is just parroting words and phrases that are statistically relevant to the human's questions.

I don't think it's unreasonable to define Turing test success as the ability to consistently fool ordinary human beings through intelligent communication- and that, so far, has not been accomplished.

From my understanding, the premise is that the 'index' generated from each crawled site will be some set of metadata smaller than the site's actual content. So instead of many robots, each crawling through all the data on your site, there could be one bot, which updates a single (smaller) index that all search engines can access.

I agree that Google's index is probably optimized to work with their search algorithm. From what the author claims, though, this doesn't mean that Google would be losing anything by allowing other engines to use the index, as "all the value is in the analysis" of the index.