Hacker News: la_barba

New comment by la_barba in "Gigantic Chinese telescope opens to astronomers worldwide"

la_barba — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 16:03:16 +0000

Okay, but you are conflating moral harm/duties with tangible physical harm. The first one is arguable, the second one (pollution of air, etc) isn't.

New comment by la_barba in "Programming Idioms"

la_barba — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 16:02:56 +0000

Back then, you could re-invent a shitty wheel, people would ignore you and your idea would die out. Now a shitty-wheel idea gets indexed into a search engine and can potentially fool a non-expert into believing that its actually a good idea. I suppose thats the problem education has been trying to solve...

New comment by la_barba in "Gigantic Chinese telescope opens to astronomers worldwide"

la_barba — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 15:53:06 +0000

Your example is off the mark. What people mean by that sentiment is that as long as you don't harm others, you should have the freedom to do what you want. Climate-change and ant-vax are issues that impact everyone else on the planet.

New comment by la_barba in "The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production?"

la_barba — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 20:30:59 +0000

Capacity is the currency of the industry they're in. Its right in the article itself.

>What Saudi is trying to do by not revealing the true picture is to protect its reputation as a reliable oil supplier, especially to its target clientele in Asia, so we have to take all of these comments with a hefty pinch of salt,

New comment by la_barba in "iPadOS"

la_barba — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 20:16:47 +0000

If that is indeed the real reason, its unfortunate that they cannot get an OS to run acceptably in 1GB of RAM. Especially when they have such a tiny amount of hardware variations to support.

New comment by la_barba in "iPadOS"

la_barba — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 17:30:32 +0000

That really isn't a like-like comparison. You are looking at just one product from Apple. In the Android and Windows world for each generation there are hundreds of thousands of hardware combinations from entry level to high end that are expected to run Windows. Also MS/Google cannot test their software with future un-released hardware. If anything, this should be a cakewalk for Apple - if they choose to. I don't know what special "tuning" is required that prevents Apple from supporting the hardware.

New comment by la_barba in "Why can’t browsers just be used for browsing (Chromium upgrade in OBS)"

la_barba — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 17:00:19 +0000

The other huge factor is that developers love re-inventing stuff. Nobody wants to be content just maintaining something that has been working for 30 years, because thats career suicide in today's world. "Hey, tell me about the cool stuff you're working on.." "You guys are still using that framework? Wow!". Its an interesting contrast from the industry I'm in (vaccines) where people are extremely risk-averse and do not ever want to disturb code/process flows that work and are making money. I have come to appreciate software reliability a LOT more.

Also.. given the massive surface area of new untested code thats being constantly pumped out, visiting a website today, is absolutely no different than downloading a random binary from the internet and running it. The ".com" address might as well be an actual .COM file that is downloaded and executed...

New comment by la_barba in "Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?"

la_barba — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 16:37:44 +0000

You haven't described what the problem actually is with schools. Homogenized knowledge systems are a simple way of having a common "API Layer" in our consciousness that other humans can access.

New comment by la_barba in "Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?"

la_barba — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 16:32:35 +0000

I don't think its a "racket". The thing with stuff like this is that nobody wants to be on the hook for re-certifying every single calculator as "equivalent".

New comment by la_barba in "How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance"

la_barba — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 21:34:47 +0000

Well the key difference is that on-paper anyway, MS claims they use telemetry to make Windows better and fix bugs, Google spies on you and your personal data so that they can sell your profile to the highest bidder who will attempt to convince you to open your wallet.

New comment by la_barba in "How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance"

la_barba — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 18:40:23 +0000

>I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, on average, prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even a moderate amount for a service.

That is the current state yes, but I think that this was a manufactured type of psychology/expectation. I remember back in the day (90s 00s) when I used to install software for my family, one of my uncles was always flabbergasted that the software was free. "But why is it free?" "How do the make rent?!" I tried to explain the Hacker/OSS ethos and whatever else I could think of, but it never really sunk in for him.

I think paid software is going to make a comeback once clients realize that nobody except google (and a handful of companies) are actually benefiting from the pointless web surveillance. Hopefully that will happen when the tech industry stops giving Google a free pass for their spying and squarely puts them in the enemy camp...

New comment by la_barba in "Apple’s New Mac Pro to Be Made in Texas"

la_barba — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 18:29:34 +0000

..created by chinese phd students

(sorry.. i know its a low-blow :P)

New comment by la_barba in "Apple’s New Mac Pro to Be Made in Texas"

la_barba — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 18:25:01 +0000

Caring about the market, and not societies, is the kind of capitalism, that the US has been heavily promoting for quite a while. But seems like young people are starting to catch on to this social-democracy thing..

New comment by la_barba in "Apple’s New Mac Pro to Be Made in Texas"

la_barba — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 18:20:15 +0000

I think you're overplaying the 'cheap crap' argument. China is quite a ways better than they were when that stereotype was passable. They can totally match what the US is doing in a large set of technology based industries. And also, because of the way supply chains work (they naturally form clusters around manufacturing hubs and engender very strong network effects) the US might not be in a position to make any high-tech product at all. It would be cheaper to manufacture it overseas rather than ship every single part/material to the US.

New comment by la_barba in "iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review"

la_barba — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 05:24:38 +0000

Um, because the images have the text "Unedited Iphone XS" on them..? But ok, I don't want to go over and dissect every single image here. That is of no benefit to either of us. The larger point is your "let me throw something out" simply muddies the waters without basing it in fact. "I don't believe it" is not really a basis for making a claim about someones work, and actually is quite unfair to both the author and the audience. Sorry, I'm a bit touchy about photography like that ;)

New comment by la_barba in "iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review"

la_barba — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 01:54:42 +0000

I have those cameras and lenses you're referring to. I've sunk in over 20K over the past many years. I still think its inexpensive compared to what I see others doing. For e.g. Cars :) :)

New comment by la_barba in "Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast"

la_barba — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 17:56:17 +0000

Yeah this was a while ago.. maybe 2007.

New comment by la_barba in "iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review"

la_barba — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 17:55:37 +0000

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. It didn't read like an ad to me. It reads like someone who was excited to use a cool new product, and wrote about it on their own website.

New comment by la_barba in "iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review"

la_barba — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 17:49:24 +0000

>What I'm afraid is that the new iPhone dark mode (or even the P30 Pro and other phones with post processing) will also process the images too much and stack them thus losing a lot of detail. When put on instagram or made smaller for Facebook/websites, you won't see the missing details, but the colors will be vibrant and that's "good enough" for most people.

BTW - one nitpick, stacking images will _improve_ image quality. Specifically - averaging images (after aligning them) taken sequentially is a common way to reduce noise artifacts. Photon noise follows a Poisson distribution and so if you take multiple images and average them you will generally get a cleaner image. The caveat being that you must be on a tripod and your subject must be still for those shots.. (ideally landscape kinda shots)

New comment by la_barba in "iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review"

la_barba — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 17:42:47 +0000

Amateurs rarely benefit from pro grade equipment. Atleast photography is somewhat cheap as a hobby. I see friends buying expensive amps or guitars because so and so uses them and they end up still sounding the same. People who were buying all these cameras, were never photographers to begin with, they jsut wanted something to record their memories with, and a smartphone is amazing for that.

If you compare like to like, same sensor tech, same quality glass .. there is absolutely no way a tiny sensor can out-resolve or out-perform a larger sensor when it comes to image quality. There are other metrics where it can - for e.g. power consumption/heat output, ability to stabilize the sensor (smaller = easier), faster readout (generally easier on smaller sensors), etc.