Hacker News: decae

New comment by decae in "Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner"

decae — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:07:56 +0000

I've posted this here before but I have been creating animations using a similar process with a regular camera and manually splicing the frames together. [1,2,3] The effect is quite interesting in how it forces focus on the subject reducing the background into an abstract pattern. Each 'line' is around 15px wide. I think I went through exactly the same thought process as the author, funny how ideas can come up independently like this.

[1] https://youtube.com/shorts/VQuI1wW8hAw [2] https://youtube.com/shorts/vE6kLolf57w [3] https://youtube.com/shorts/QxvFyasQYAY

I also shot a timelapse of the Tokyo skyline at sunset and applied a similar process [4], then motion tracked it so that time is traveling across the frame from left to right[5]. Each line here is 4 pixels wide and the original animation is in 8k.

[4] https://youtu.be/wTma28gwSk0 [5] https://youtu.be/v5HLX5wFEGk

New comment by decae in "Understanding young news audiences at a time of rapid change"

decae — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:19:38 +0000

Attenborough narrated documentaries are filled with death and carnage, shot by the most patient cinematographers in the world. What a nonsense take.

New comment by decae in "How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants"

decae — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:02:27 +0000

In Tokyo when I search for convenience stores, a lot of the time Google Maps will also show ATMs, assuming that's the reason I want to go to a convenience store. Inversely, if I search for a bank branch, it'll show convenience stores. The fuzzy search results can be very frustrating sometimes.

New comment by decae in "Strong earthquake hits northern Japan, tsunami warning issued"

decae — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:51:42 +0000

Shards of glass falling from ten stories up would be one of the main things to try to avoid.

New comment by decae in "Microsoft needs to open up more about its OpenAI dealings"

decae — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 12:42:40 +0000

This may be the funniest comment I've ever read, considering the circumstances.

New comment by decae in "Line scan camera image processing for train photography"

decae — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:34:05 +0000

That sounds like a lot of fun to play around with, thank you!

New comment by decae in "Line scan camera image processing for train photography"

decae — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 22:00:50 +0000

How is this possible? What sort of camera can do this?

New comment by decae in "Line scan camera image processing for train photography"

decae — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 05:10:59 +0000

I have been creating animations using a similar process but with a regular camera and manually splicing the frames together. [1,2,3] The effect is quite interesting in how it forces focus on the subject reducing the background into an abstract pattern. Each 'line' is around 15px wide.

[1] https://youtube.com/shorts/VQuI1wW8hAw [2] https://youtube.com/shorts/vE6kLolf57w [3] https://youtube.com/shorts/QxvFyasQYAY

[4] https://youtu.be/wTma28gwSk0 [5] https://youtu.be/v5HLX5wFEGk

New comment by decae in "The Rise of Ritual Features: Why Platforms Are Adding Daily Puzzle Games"

decae — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 16:32:17 +0000

Totally agree.

Would:

> Daily puzzles are engaging, efficient, scalable, and well-aligned with key product and business goals.

bring it back within the realm of human-generated PR text? Or it's too perfect? I find the perfect number of syllables to be off putting sometimes, it can feel like the uncanny valley of text.

New comment by decae in "Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole"

decae — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 01:31:00 +0000

Not only does the sun not rotate around us, the rest of the galaxy doesn't even care to think that we exist. An interesting evolution in thought nonetheless.

New comment by decae in "How Nintendo bled Atari games to death"

decae — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 14:30:31 +0000

I wouldn't say it's hatred, they're just extremely risk adverse - every situation needs to be entered with caution. It seems to be common across a wide range of Japanese companies.

Recently, there is a certain amount of Disneyesque revenue maximization that seems to be going on though, and keeping control of legacy titles is a part of that for sure.

New comment by decae in "Atari Missile Command Game Built Using AI Gemini 2.5 Pro"

decae — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 16:19:32 +0000

It feels to me like it's getting democratized in the same sense as to what happened to professional photography in the early 2000s with the introduction of digital cameras and high quality color inkjet printers. The barrier to entry becomes so much lower.

Instead of dealing with the costs associated with using, developing and printing from film, as well as the skills associated with knowing what a photo would look like before it was developed, digital cameras allowed new photographers to enter the industry relatively cheaply and shoot off a few thousand photos at a wedding at a relatively negligible cost. Those photographers rapidly developed their skills, and left studios with massive million dollar Kodak digital chemical printers in the dust. I know because I was working at one.

If you remember, this was in the time where the studio owned your negatives ostensibly forever, and you had to pay for reprints or enlargements. What were amateur photographers could enter this high-margin market, produce images of an acceptable quality, charge far less and provide far more.

I'm not able to say whether this will happen to software development, but the democratization of professional photography absolutely shook the somewhat complacent industry to its core.

In that case it had nothing to do with contempt for creative people, it was the opposite, anyone who wanted to be creative now could be.

New comment by decae in "'They refused to let me go': Japanese turn to resignation agencies to quit jobs"

decae — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 12:19:42 +0000

In this context, the final line would be:

Then when my children needed a teacher, and I became sick, or old, there was no one left to support me.

New comment by decae in "How does the sky turn dark at night?"

decae — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 11:59:24 +0000

Cheers! I became a bit obsessed with timelapses and this technique during the pandemic. It was shot in Ichikawa, Chiba, close to the station.

And yes, definitely, it's quite stark. I guess a combination of being shot in summer and Tokyo's location relatively close to the equator. I'm originally from southern Australia and the dusk there is far longer.

New comment by decae in "How does the sky turn dark at night?"

decae — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 06:35:39 +0000

I shot a timelapse of the Tokyo skyline at sunset that is similar to this but with much more detail [0], and then motion tracked it so that time is traveling across the frame from left to right[1]. In a similar process to the linked NASA image, the video is made of strips, but each strip is 4 pixels wide. It turned out very different compared to how I imagined it would, but that is due to the stages explained in the linked article. Super interesting!

[0] https://youtu.be/wTma28gwSk0 [1] https://youtu.be/v5HLX5wFEGk

New comment by decae in "The world nearly adopted a calendar with 13 months of 28 days"

decae — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:49 +0000

Is this a joke?

New comment by decae in "Show HN: Broken Bear, the AI teddy bear that loves your broken self"

decae — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 21:10:01 +0000

This is a precursor to a Rule 34 of AI. If you can think of it, it exists.