Hacker News: watercooler_guy

It finds the derivative: The Ott Derivimeter (1930s) [video]

watercooler_guy — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 04:59:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Wdjz2uiPY

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42592540

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

If English was written like Chinese (1999)

watercooler_guy — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 17:34:42 +0000

Article URL: https://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40565060

Points: 325

# Comments: 300

Enshittification

watercooler_guy — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 16:04:50 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37987639

Points: 18

# Comments: 1

New comment by watercooler_guy in "Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?"

watercooler_guy — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 03:11:10 +0000

I strongly second this. The JetBrains model is the best of both worlds and everybody wins. Being able to own a certain version of the software at my option makes me feel respected by the company, and it's also motivation for the company to continue delivering real value to users over time -- they gotta earn that subscription fee :)

Depending on the product, another model I like is dual licensing, where if you're an individual or noncommercial user, you get one price/it's free, and if you're a commercial customer, you get another price/subscription agreement

New comment by watercooler_guy in "Retro personal computer ads from the 1980s"

watercooler_guy — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 03:40:34 +0000

I think the novel and interesting tech is still happening, its just that without the colorful ads for it on TV, and without the software being packaged up and sold with pretty box art that you can physically hold, it doesn't feel as much like a capital-E Experience. It's probably the Internet's fault that we don't do things like that anymore, but the upside is that we now have access to so many ideas and applications from all over, even ones that aren't commercially viable.

Some that look exciting to me are: an AI that lets you animate still photos realistically [1], a simple website that guides you to discover new parks, eateries, and other places near you [2], an AI that colorizes old black-and-white photos/video [3], a Street View style map of the game world from "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild", with some 1st person 360 degree photos [4], and a tiny game engine that lets you distribute your whole game physically via printed QR codes [5].

If marketing and graphic design people ever felt like getting together to do some 'side projects', I vote that they should make print ads for apps/websites that they like :)

[1] https://github.com/AliaksandrSiarohin/first-order-model

[2] https://randomlocation.xyz (https://randomlocation.xyz/help.txt for customization)

[3] https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify

[4] https://nassimsoftware.github.io/zeldabotwstreetview/

[5] https://github.com/kesiev/rewtro

Reverse Engineering the Weather Star 4000

watercooler_guy — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 16:10:14 +0000

Article URL: https://hackaday.io/project/178144-reverse-engineering-the-weather-star-4000

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33123246

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by watercooler_guy in "Game Emulation via Neural Network"

watercooler_guy — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 18:59:55 +0000

This was an interesting application of neural nets and a good write up! I’m curious how a game might be made from scratch using a neural net, i.e. what would it train on? I think this would be a cool technique to have at our disposal because games implemented as neural nets might make data mining harder, so all the cool secrets in the game wouldn’t be immediately exposed upon release :)

New comment by watercooler_guy in "Game Emulation via Neural Network"

watercooler_guy — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 05:49:49 +0000

From the author's twitter, here are links to a download of the network and to a site that lets you view the network architecture as a flow chart: https://twitter.com/madebyollin/status/1566886407117107200?s...

New comment by watercooler_guy in "Show HN: Zelda Breath of The Wild Street View"

watercooler_guy — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 23:49:58 +0000

Very, very cool project! I think I actually prefer this streetview approach to the floating noclip approach, because a map + streetview that works like google maps cements the feeling that the game world is as real as my city -- here's the map in my web browser, no need to run a video game!

To your knowledge, are there any special tricks to store many panorama images so you could feasibly capture entire paths continuously through the map, or even entire maps for smaller games?

New comment by watercooler_guy in "LCD handheld games re-created as Windows apps"

watercooler_guy — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 15:58:10 +0000

The website specifies that these are “simulations” (re-creations of the games’ apparent behavior that attempt to stay faithful to the original) and not “emulations” (reproductions of the actual hardware behavior of the circuitry): http://www.madrigaldesign.it/sim/info.php

LCD handheld games re-created as Windows apps

watercooler_guy — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 15:50:16 +0000

Article URL: http://www.madrigaldesign.it/sim/download.php#singles

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714289

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by watercooler_guy in "Authentic Volumetric Avatars from a Phone Scan"

watercooler_guy — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 15:31:08 +0000

This is, I think, the killer technology that would allow VR to be seriously used for meetings with other people, especially in business. If these avatars can be animated continuously as someone is speaking, so that lip movements are matched, that would seal the deal.

New comment by watercooler_guy in "[dead]"

watercooler_guy — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 15:05:53 +0000

The article states that it was the CFO, not the CEO, of Bed, Bath, and Beyond

New comment by watercooler_guy in "4.2 Gigabytes, Or: How to Draw Anything"

watercooler_guy — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 22:15:51 +0000

I think that’s an interesting connection and way to look at this. I first encountered that sort of artistic inspiration on a Twitter account that randomly generated sheet music snippets. Sure the generation could be garbage, but that gives the artist a starting point to say “this is bad because X, it should be more like Y”. And of course with these AI models, the generation is more likely to be good. Having a divined/generated starting point for creative work can definitely be an invaluable tool.

New comment by watercooler_guy in "List of Creepypastas"

watercooler_guy — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 09:20:15 +0000

I‘ve always been a big fan of creepypastas —- they can be really well done and scary in novel ways. To some extent, I believed some of them to be real when I was a kid.

If creepypastas were “invented” today, would they have made as big of a cultural splash? Or would they get lost in a sea of other content, or be debunked and discarded too quickly?

Edit: I re-read the list and noticed some more recent creations on there, like The Backrooms. Maybe it’s less about believability and more about being a good story, which the Internet is still great at facilitating. So I guess my question is, did anyone else believe some of the earlier creepypastas, and was believability important to the popularity back then?

New comment by watercooler_guy in "The mental Universe (2005) [pdf]"

watercooler_guy — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 07:25:08 +0000

It was my understanding that the observer effect (the act of observing a system can affect that system) is not due to the system "knowing" that a conscious mind is observing it, but rather that the instruments used to observe the system alter the system. But then this essay says

> the wave function is collapsed simply by your human mind seeing nothing. The Universe is entirely mental.

So what is this "mental nature of the Universe"? If the things we see at the macro scale are not made of underlying particles and waves, what are they made of?

New comment by watercooler_guy in "The AI and the Tree"

watercooler_guy — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 06:17:31 +0000

This is about using AI to solve problems in ways humans couldn't even think of (e.g. wacky but optimal 3-D printed designs for building materials).

The AI and the Tree

watercooler_guy — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 06:15:31 +0000

Article URL: http://booktwo.org/notebook/the-ai-and-the-tree/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32505924

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

New comment by watercooler_guy in "Turkey’s underground city of 20k people"

watercooler_guy — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 06:21:04 +0000

Wow, imagine curling up in your cozy, carved-out dwelling deep underground to read manuscripts by candlelight...

or more realistically, to hide from violent sieges on the city

New comment by watercooler_guy in "Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?"

watercooler_guy — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 07:29:38 +0000

That’s a really neat idea, what better way to intuitively understand what a program is doing than a familiar physical environment in front of you.

Reminds me of the esolang Taxi, where you perform computation by giving directions to a taxi driver carrying “passengers” (data) around a city [1]

The city metaphor would probably create a whole new genre of software-art too, where you can optimize for beautiful layout/architecture as well as efficiency.

[1] https://bigzaphod.github.io/Taxi/