Hacker News: DanAndersen

New comment by DanAndersen in "Sanitation conquered disease long before vaccines or antibiotics"

DanAndersen — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 02:22:54 +0000

That's true -- though the figure you're linking focuses specifically on measles cases rather than overall mortality, which is what the OP article is focusing on.

(as an aside, it's really weird that the (first few) comments here on HN seem a little adversarial; I wonder if maybe some people looked at the headline only and assumed it was attempting some sort of anti-vax argument, which the article isn't doing at all.)

New comment by DanAndersen in "Disasters"

DanAndersen — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 13:23:52 +0000

Very good link. I think a lot of people get intimidated by the idea of emergency preparedness because it feels like such a big, overwhelming thing to deal with. One cause of this is perhaps the Hollywood/media image of "disaster" as a singular extreme event that obliterates the average person except for a few plucky heroes. In contrast, there's a full spectrum of severity, and any small amount of preparedness can help.

In case anyone here hasn't seen it before, I'd like to share the article "Doomsday planning for less crazy folk" [0]. It's a good, sober-headed step-by-step guide to evaluating one's own threat model and making actionable steps toward improving one's emergency preparedness -- both small-scale and large-scale. I have a routine to-do item to re-read one section of this article every few weeks and think of ways I can make myself more resilient.

[0] http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/

25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer

DanAndersen — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 18:18:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.riumplus.com/25-hour-digital-myst-dni-clock-chronometer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22140955

Points: 168

# Comments: 33

Wenyan‑Lang – Programming Language for the Ancient Chinese

DanAndersen — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 21:21:30 +0000

Article URL: http://wenyan-lang.lingdong.works/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21818971

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

DeepFovea: Using deep learning for foveated reconstruction in AR/VR

DanAndersen — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 14:23:49 +0000

Article URL: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/deepfovea-using-deep-learning-for-foveated-reconstruction-in-ar-vr

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21573040

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

New comment by DanAndersen in "Army photogrammetry technique makes 3D aerial maps in minutes"

DanAndersen — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 23:34:44 +0000

Agreed, the GPS priors are very helpful -- the ability to specify prior known positions/orientations of photos, to some known error tolerances, is one of the power features in Agisoft Metashape Pro, which I wish was available in more photogrammetry software. Being able to know the actual nearby photos a priori and avoid the costly O(N^2) pairwise comparison is a great benefit.

Some research I did a few months ago was about trying to find ways to effectively bring in that advantage of outdoor photogrammetry into indoor environments, by piggybacking onto AR HMDs with built-in SLAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldrGpGrOaZc

SpaceInk: Making Space for In-Context Annotations

DanAndersen — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 16:41:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbPD5_wPapQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356740

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Farmers Fable – A Tale of Cooperation

DanAndersen — Sat, 29 Jun 2019 20:52:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.farmersfable.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20314710

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Reality Lab Lectures: Yaser Sheikh – Photorealistic Telepresence

DanAndersen — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 15:02:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpdX9jkhv2U

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20249948

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Simulated Culture War Roundup Thread Using GPT-2

DanAndersen — Tue, 14 May 2019 06:24:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bo26lv/simulated_culture_war_roundup_thread_using_gpt2/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907225

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

“Beat Saber” Appearance on Jimmy Fallon Leads to YouTube Copyright Auto-Blocks

DanAndersen — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 04:22:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/bihwd1/because_beatsaber_appeared_on_jimmy_fallon_if/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19775804

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by DanAndersen in "MuseNet"

DanAndersen — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 18:17:10 +0000

Perhaps an AI-assisted version of Ben Folds' "composing a symphony on-stage"? [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BytUY_AwTUs

New comment by DanAndersen in "Apple Face-Recognition Blamed by New York Teen for False Arrest"

DanAndersen — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 11:35:56 +0000

What should be the exact dollar amount to avoid "looking like he's using it to drum up publicity"? You presumably have some idea of what the "right answer" is since your gut is telling you $1bn is too much.

New comment by DanAndersen in "Microplastics Are Blowing in the Wind"

DanAndersen — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 12:10:26 +0000

Additionally, what I find particularly frightening and unsettling is the possibility that we'll never be able to know just how harmful microplastics are, due to the rapid loss of anything we could call a "control group" on the planet. Rapid industrialization and globalization has led to land, water, and sky all being infused with this stuff; are there populated areas anymore where we could point to and say "this place is untouched by microplastics" and compare the health of the people and ecosystem there to the affected areas?

New comment by DanAndersen in "The infamous “AI gaydar” study was repeated – couln't be reproduced"

DanAndersen — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 17:34:56 +0000

This is true, which is why machine learning has long since learned to not even think of what you describe as a meaningful measure of accuracy. If you look at the linked paper [0], you'll find that the author uses the "ROC AUC" metric [1]:

>The ROC AUC score represents the probability that when given one randomly chosen positive instance and one randomly chosen negative instance, the classifier will correctly identify the positive instance

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.10739.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...

New comment by DanAndersen in "The Shrinking World of the Stamp Collector (2012)"

DanAndersen — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 11:58:41 +0000

A question for anyone who does collecting of stamps/coins/baseball cards, etc.: How do you deal with / feel about the trend of the creators of the collected items making things specifically to be collected?

A while back I picked up a few cheap pre-WW1 German coins -- fun to have a bit of history for not that much money. I haven't pursued coin collecting because I could imagine going down a rabbit hole of spending way too much money on it. But when I see, say, the US Mint releasing special commemorative coins specifically for collectors, my whole interest in the field dries up. It takes a hobby that, in my opinion, would be about discovery and the individual search for something and turns it into merely another consumer product to consume. Same with so many stamps nowadays, being designed and released specifically for collectors to gobble up. And then there's baseball cards and Magic cards and "colllector's editions" of video game boxes that are all designed as these mass-market products that satisfy the collecting urge in a cynical way.

If I did end up really getting into collecting, I'd think it would be more enjoyable to collect interesting rocks found during travel, or historical items like coins/stamps that were all made before the trend of marketing to collectors.

New comment by DanAndersen in "Ask HN: Tell me what you think a good job ad looks like"

DanAndersen — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 15:50:54 +0000

If you list job requirements, make them actual requirements and don't try to upsell the talent you get by exaggerating the requirements.

Some applicants are naturally more haggle-friendly and intuitively "know" they should apply to jobs for which they don't technically have all the listed requirements. Other applicants are more self-doubtful and will not apply, even if given their experience they would be well-suited for the job. Minimize the amount of white-lying both the applicant and the company have to do.

New comment by DanAndersen in "Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?"

DanAndersen — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 03:57:56 +0000

To any Google employees who read HN: please raise this general issue in your internal groups and try to push to change this culture of faceless algorithmic decision making. Companies should not have to rely on getting to the HN front page to have a human being actually look at these issues. You have a voice internally and if you don't use it, in some way you are complicit.

New comment by DanAndersen in "How does the Hololens 2 matter?"

DanAndersen — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 05:45:46 +0000

>Is this research somehow tied into the relationship between UI and imaging AR head mounted displays or are you focussing on tablet/phone AR?

It's focused on having virtual/AR content that is rendered by an AR HMD like the HoloLens, but which is rigidly anchored to a handheld object. So, for example, having extra windows or panels on a phone that float beyond the rectangle that defines the physical smartphone shape.

>This is actually why I think Magic Leap made a smart decision by making their device so 'enclosed' (as opposed to MSHL that is extremely open and unoccluded), which effectively artificially narrows the peripheral vision.

I think this was an issue that the HoloLens 1 had/has in terms of the plastic "eyeglasses" region -- because it looks like it wraps around the full eye FOV when looking at the headset before putting it on, users are disappointed when they wear it and it's revealed just how (relatively) low the FOV is. Setting proper expectations is important for users.

New comment by DanAndersen in "How does the Hololens 2 matter?"

DanAndersen — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 02:23:19 +0000

As someone doing AR research, I can definitely echo the importance of higher FOV for getting closer to the "holograms." I am currently doing some investigations involving tracked hand-held devices (like smartphones/tablets) with the AR HMD, and I've found that users tend to unnaturally hold the device really far out in an attempt to see any AR content that is placed relative to the tracked object. Hopefully even a modest improvement in FOV can overcome this subconscious tendency and open up a wider range of interactions.