HN user

hemdawgz

84 karma
Posts0
Comments31
View on HN
No posts found.

I'm curious about this. How many years ago was this, and would you be willing to divulge the general vicinity of the neighbourhood you rented or lived in?

Halide Mark II 6 years ago

MkI was the absolute best tool to do that one thing. Respectfully, MkII compromises on manual control to an unacceptable degree for my usage and an investment in education for beginners along with dumbing down the UI with explicit text labels (the font is indeed nice, but why do things with clean and clear iconography need these additional labels?) is not what I'd consider part of "that one thing". Of course, these issues could be fixed in the future, at which point I'd gladly eat my words.

Halide Mark II 6 years ago

"Full manual control" is somewhat crippled in Mk II (it switches back to Auto every time I switch back cameras) as well as removing the ability to pin ISO down when making use of tap autoexposure (there is no option but to have both exposure length and ISO adjusted now). Manually adjusting exposure length also sometimes leads to it getting "stuck" on long values like 1/2 or 1/1 far longer than Mk I ever did. I get that they think their new Auto mode is better, but in general this was a bug-infested and unwelcome surprise update for my usage of the app (getting maximum quality raw images out of my phone mounted to a small tripod.) None of this would be an issue if I had any way of opting out of this generous "upgrade" I couldn't refuse. UI fit and finish has also degraded significantly from my subjective POV and the large potential scope of future feature updates make me pessimistically assume that the app will continue to fail to be particularly well tested. If the devs are still listening I'd gladly pay (again) just to have the MkI app back, if money is what they want.

You clearly don't work for one of the ones that grant 7 figure salaries. I'm not saying they're common or that any engineer can aspire to achieve one, I'm saying they exist, I've seen it first hand, and I don't understand why it's so hard for you to accept they exist. Nothing in your comment constitutes novel insight to me, and neither of us have a good measure as to which of us have more credibility than the other, but I suspect you're just judging based on your own narrow experience.

Edit, just for more context I'm speaking of FAANG level companies here and very rare individual unicorn engineers who have been specifically hired into these kinds of positions for past achievements that have impact across the whole industry. I would agree with your general skepticism in any other context.

Yes, but if this engineer's achievements are well known, competition between companies is what drives crazy comp because they are seen more like a strategic asset rather than another engineer. They wouldn't quite be a low-level employee, these unicorn ICs often report directly to middle management or above. I'm surprised how little industry experience some of these commenters seem to have given that it's HN.

People who see it happen don't even have enough hard details to confirm it to themselves aside from the fact that they're witnessing it firsthand. The best I can do, for example, is to say that at FB I worked with someone who was very well known as a very highly ranked IC, and that the comp in the band he was known to be in is astronomical (1m+ annually). Another factor is that we don't want to dox ourselves by giving out biographical details that would otherwise have built a case. This particular engineer had built foundations of particular unprecedented things within industry with enormous current relevance, even to laymen, before acquiring their current rank. I can't get more specific than that, but $1m is absolute peanuts compared to the size of the market sectors these engineers have a hand in shaping.

Learn Genetics 6 years ago

For me it involves scrounging around for anything related as a jumping off point, and sniffing for important keywords and concepts to look up and branch out into learning. Usually it takes me a few days of exploration before I stumble upon a really good or authoritative resource of some sort, and I end up mapping out the internet locations of related communities and resources in the process.

Of course, it's much faster when having experienced friends or acquaintances to help you navigate.

Thanks for pointing that out, I would have missed that important detail otherwise. The majority of his games are indeed in HTML5, so I do wonder what made him choose Flash as an export target for the one or two such games I've seen.

I noticed that some of these 2014 games (in particular the first one) are created in Flash, which to me suggests that there are still some purposes within rich web media it suits better than the plain web html5/css/js stack everyone is trying to kill it with. I really hope support for Flash isn't widely dropped before we can replicate its utility for richly interactive media in our new standards. (The web seems now just for websites and web applications rather than more rich games and animations.)

I don't know how much time it really saves me, but in addition to the convenience I find it much less intrusive (e.g. in meetings or other social situations, or when walking) to quickly glance at my watch to read an incoming notification rather than pulling my phone out.

Little-known tip (I think): messenger.com offers a web UI for Facebook chat similar to their iOS/Android apps, also ad-free and significantly cleaner than the actual Facebook UI. No idea whether it's actually better on power consumption though.

Amazon Echo Dot 10 years ago

The video quality probably doesn't compare but I've used an old iPhone with iPCamera (i'm sure Android equivalents exist) installed for this purpose, which simply hosts an mjpeg stream at a local IP address. It should be simple to start or stop recording the stream on any device that's connected.

I use Chrome's Add to Desktop feature for SoundCloud and other webapps, which adds a shortcut to launch the webpage in a dedicated window (without the browser chrome, etc.) The window is managed separately from your normal browser windows (if any) and acts like a first-class native app.

I noticed a very similar contrast watching the UK and US police responses to these Twitch streamers who were swatted. American SWAT team bursts in and arrests streamer at gunpoint even after they've established there's no threat, while UK police knock on door, ask a few questions and leave ("We got a call saying someone killed their family here." "Oh, no, do you want to speak with my mom?" "No, that's alright").

US: https://youtu.be/TiW-BVPCbZk?t=114 UK: https://youtu.be/Kda5rv_kyGs?t=30

Unfortunately when I tried to set up a local synchronization solution I could not find any simple guides without already knowing what the names of the protocols were. Call me a filthy plebian, but in contrast all of my friends already knew what Dropbox was.

Funny story (missing the point I know), the Dropbox client has provisions to automatically detect other clients on your network and then sync your files to your other computers over LAN rather than through Dropbox servers (files are still synced to the servers of course, but they don't have to make a return trip to your other computers).

That market was Flash, which has an absolutely huge content base of now-aging vector animations and games. I'm still not sure what the general rationale was for flash support becoming uncool, technical or otherwise.

edit: I suppose it was widely used for web applications or even entire websites, which is now an obviously inappropriate use case, but I've still yet to see any new web technology properly replace it for polished vector-rendered animations or games.

I suppose this misunderstanding boils down to semantics. By definition they are objectively better off. However, past a baseline threshold for human survival it's argued that a person's subjective perception of well-being is relative to that of others around him. Objectively, we are many times better off than we were pre-industrialization in almost every way imaginable, but does that make us many times happier or more satisfied than people who are unaware of such a standard of living? The argument is that they would perceive their well-being as much worse if they were aware, even if nothing has objectively changed.

The divided opinions on this gallery are revealing. I can see why someone would find these works excruciatingly boring, in that they are all essentially photographs with no variety in artist's intent or 'method of art' for lack of a better term. But looking at them less abstractly, there is a rich variety of scenes depicted which are skilfully created enough to merit closer observation. I think the parent discovered a really useful litmus test for how someone approaches art.

Much of contemporary art seeks to subvert that notion, even if you find it difficult to consider it real art (I do).

What I think OP was saying was that the success of /an individual/, not the work he puts out, is not objective. There are certainly objective standards of quality for the work an individual creates. I think OP's point was that even a person who's put out nothing but unsuccessful work is a successful person if he is happy with it.