Hacker News: patrickg_zill

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Minecraft’s creator excluded from event over his ‘comments and opinions’"

patrickg_zill — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 17:19:24 +0000

If I felt that Microsoft was delivering high quality software and was a meritocracy I would cut them a lot of slack, no matter what opinions they espoused and who they favored or excluded.

Unfortunately I have to use Skype for Business literally every working day and it's symptomatic of a company that is fat dumb and happy, secure in its cash flow.

New comment by patrickg_zill in "If a $5B Fine Is Chump Change, How Do You Punish Facebook?"

patrickg_zill — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 13:46:30 +0000

Nothing changes until people start to go to jail.

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Photography and racial bias"

patrickg_zill — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 15:24:20 +0000

You can do an image search on your favorite search engine and look for someone like Donna Brazile, who has been in politics for a long time and understands appearing on TV.

Then you can look at the clothes she is wearing and realize that in every photo where she is wearing a lighter dress or jacket, the automatic exposure settings of the camera adjusted for the average lighting of the scene and underexposed her face.

That is why, because Brazile has done countless TV appearances for decades ... in most of the photos you can see that she wears darker jackets or clothing.

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Photography and racial bias"

patrickg_zill — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 06:43:29 +0000

Take a raking kind of light, and shine it on a beige to brown colored wall, so that the light will be stronger on one side and gradually fade in intensity (that is, less reflected light) across the field of view.

Now place a different shade of brown upholstered chair, in front of this wall.

Take a photo using the Hasselblad X1D, currently considered to have the most accurate color of mainstream cameras.

Now try to print it accurately, even with the best quality paper and a high end inkjet printer.

Even master printmakers will struggle with it.

Why?

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Matrox History: A Computer Graphics Also-Ran’s Second Life"

patrickg_zill — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 04:09:57 +0000

Not only that but they would change the behavior of a chip between revisions, so drivers for one revision, if they didn't take into account the changes, would suddenly stop working even though you bought the same ( but unknown to you, newer) version of the card.

(source: me, who worked at a company that made commercial Linux drivers for Matrox, ATI,NeoMagic etc. chips )

New comment by patrickg_zill in "How to hide from the AI surveillance state with a color printout"

patrickg_zill — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 13:51:52 +0000

So basically if you printed a strange design on one of those T-shirts that can be printed on all over, you could fool the AI in most cases... the same way that "Dazzle" camouflage for ships, works... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Project VGA – Home of the Low Budget, Open Source, VGA Compatible Card (2008)"

patrickg_zill — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 05:08:20 +0000

Different for sure, but amazing that a $3-5 ESP8266 can output VGA (monochrome) with hardly any additional hardware: https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=564673.0

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Downsized dwellings: Inside Tokyo's tiny living spaces"

patrickg_zill — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 13:24:32 +0000

There are zoning laws in many, many parts of the country that prohibit housing under a certain size, usually about 700 square feet, which is enough for 2 bedrooms and 1.5 baths.

New comment by patrickg_zill in "AJIT, a ‘Made in India’ Microprocessor"

patrickg_zill — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 13:02:59 +0000

Everything you say is accurate, but, grad students have to start somewhere. If they can make a 65nm version that runs at say 500Mhz, that would be better. Remember that "real work" was done on desktops on a Sparcv8 chip that ran at 75Mhz or less.

New comment by patrickg_zill in "AJIT, a ‘Made in India’ Microprocessor"

patrickg_zill — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 11:40:53 +0000

If compliant with the Sparcv8 ABI it would immediately have a lot of software and compiler support.

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Simple cooking methods flush arsenic out of rice (2015)"

patrickg_zill — Sun, 21 Apr 2019 20:48:29 +0000

Consumes water? What is the water changed into at the molecular level, exactly?

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Germans Who Refused to Execute Civilians During World War II (1988) [pdf]"

patrickg_zill — Sun, 21 Apr 2019 20:37:12 +0000

What are the sources you are quoting?

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Parents and students in Kansas have concerns about the Summit Learning program"

patrickg_zill — Sun, 21 Apr 2019 15:26:49 +0000

Summit demands an extraordinary amount of personal information about each student and plans to track them through college and beyond,”

If true, then, this info should have been in the first paragraph ...

New comment by patrickg_zill in "France's Basque Region Creates Its Own Currency"

patrickg_zill — Sat, 20 Apr 2019 17:54:08 +0000

I was wondering how they funded it, in this case with upfront fees.

See the "miracle of Wor"gl" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgl for a different way they addressed the problem.

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Ask HN: How do I improve our data infrastructure?"

patrickg_zill — Sat, 20 Apr 2019 17:15:42 +0000

Successful presentation of this idea is left as an exercise for the reader :)

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Ask HN: How do I improve our data infrastructure?"

patrickg_zill — Sat, 20 Apr 2019 15:14:59 +0000

For 100 gb that might grow to 1tb:

2x NVME drives, each 1tb in size. Buy pcie adapter as needed.

Buy used 256gb RAM server off eBay.

Install drives into server. Put all data on the nvme drives and all other files on regular drives.

Everything will fit in ram after the data is touched the first time after each boot. Can't get faster than that, usually.

Create user accounts for each user, set up git etc. for code storage and to encourage reuse.

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Selective Empathy Can Chip Away at Civil Society"

patrickg_zill — Sat, 20 Apr 2019 11:49:09 +0000

After abusing the great majority of people in the US for the last 50 years both economically and socially, the elite are now surprised by the fact that some of the people have noticed.

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Another ZFS Port on Linux"

patrickg_zill — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 04:00:45 +0000

I am certainly looking forward to trying it out!

ZFS is a great filesystem and being able to possibly have a better implementation than we do at the moment, or at least, be able to spur additional development and optimization, is very welcome!

New comment by patrickg_zill in "Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent"

patrickg_zill — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 11:56:54 +0000

Nothing will ever change until someone goes to jail, IMHO.

New comment by patrickg_zill in "‘When the Glaciers Disappear, Those Species Will Go Extinct’"

patrickg_zill — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:16:23 +0000

"What is the North Atlantic Oscillation?"