stoev

Any ideas how the signal is transmitted once the drone is underwater? Typical RC transmitters run 2.4 GHz. Some systems use 700 MHz. The former wouldn't penetrate at all, the latter might penetrate to a shallow depth, but I think that what's shown in the video is deep enough that the signal would get attenuated. There doesn't seem to be a tether and the drone doesn't seem to have any computer vision capabilities to fly itself whilst under water. I wonder how they solved this.

Thanks for the feedback. We will work on an onboarding procedure for this demo that's more easily accessible.

Thanks!

That's a good question. If you have many tabs open from the same few websites (depending on what those websites are), maybe just grouping them based on domain names would be enough to provide context.

But LLMs are needed if you want the product to have a deeper understanding of everything that you are reading and really organise it into groups. You might be reading about architecture across three devices, multiple browsers, from a bunch of different websites. This gives you the opportunity to reunite them and really dive into that topic when you need to.

LLMs are also used to create summaries of each page. So, if some content takes 30 minutes to read, you can have them extract all the interesting information for you in bullet points and based on that you can decide if its worth spending the 30 minutes or if you would rather just close that tab.

So, in short, it's about capabilities. You can have just simple statistical models and regex rules filtering similar websites into predefined categories, or you can have a tool that truly organises your reading and shortens it for you. But for the latter, you need complex models handling a lot of context.

I actually just submitted something quite relevant - a side project we soft-launched today that uses LLMs to analyse and group browser tabs across various browsers and devices. It turns out that it’s super demanding for today’s models, but with some optimisations and experimentation, we made it work pretty well.

Running local LLMs might be a heavy order currently to get the job done, but in the near future I don't see a reason why it couldn't be done and it would definitely be quite helpful to people who have either many tabs open or a lot of bookmarks they want to organise.

Ironically, Opera's extension shop is dead and no one reviews new submissions, but for anyone else who is interested in learning more about how we use LLMs to improve the browsing experience or even give the product a shot, here is a link:

https://tabcrunch.com/technical_deep_dive.html

There is a more egregious example of Google abusing its dominance with Google Analytics that people often don’t talk about.

With Google Analytics, they offer a free service. Obviously, competitors can’t do that if their business is solely analytics and they don’t have other ways to monetise the service. That’s not the problem. The problem is how Google then use that free service to gain an advantage with their core money-making business - AdWords and DV360:

As anyone in the industry knows, due to many factors (including different attribution methodologies), ad platforms show significantly different results from analytics platforms. The discrepancies easily reach into the double-digit percentages. Any discrepancy of such magnitude is concerning to an advertiser running paid ads. The same discrepancy exists between Google AdWords and Google Analytics too. Except when you integrate the two. Then, Google AdWords data are plugged directly into Google Analytics, eliminating the discrepancy rate and making it seem to any advertiser as if Google AdWords is a far more reliable traffic source then any of their competitors.

It would be very difficult to extrapolate the monetary value of what Google have earned doing this. It is a much more sophisticated and hard to detect example of dominance abuse.

Thank you for the thoughtful comment. I do actually agree with many of your points. And you are right, this could be a much longer discussion. Let me just add this - your last sentence doesn’t have to be in past tense. I believe publishers still can set themselves apart and leverage their strengths. The next couple of years will show if GDPR and the CCPA can actually help to achieve that.

Sure, there are niche categories that would be hard to get. But for your two specific examples you could use those simple sets of criteria:

1. Target specific articles with advice for older runners in running publications. 2. Target Italian recipes in cooking websites only for users located in Denver.

You don’t need to do those things manually, it can be automated. Sure, it might not deliver the scale that FB and Google are promising, but to say that it’s impossible to do contextually is not accurate.

Use Google Search ads to capture all direct intent.

Sure, it is in the author’s employer best interest for the industry to switch to contextual advertising. But it is also in the best interest of the end user. So why is that a bad thing?

I also don’t believe that behavioural advertising is better by definition. Even the article mentions some research to prove the contrary. I’ve seen it from first-hand experience as well. Which, of course, is anecdotal. But what is not is the fact that the world’s largest and most profitable advertising product, Google Search, is completely reliant on contextual rather than behavioural targeting.

The fact that publishers so far have not been able to do something about FB’s and Google’s duopoly doesn’t necessarily mean they will never be able to. Or at least I certainly hope that it doesn’t.

There is a very important point made in this article that is unfortunately lost in-between all the other arguments:

“Meanwhile, the ability to track users wherever they go tends to shift ad revenue from higher quality sites to less reputable ones. “The way the adtech system works is, it follows the reader from Wired.com all the way down to the cheapest possible place, the basement bottom-feeders on the internet, and will serve you the ads there.””

Many people don’t like seeing ads. But they do like receiving the free content that those ads pay for. And would find it far more annoying if all the content was locked behind paywalls. Whether we like it or not, digital advertising is a powerful equaliser that gave free access to vast amounts of information to anyone from any country and from any income bracket.

But the shift towards audience targeting has stripped high-quality content creators of their share of the value they create and has instead spread it out to countless click-baity websites and apps designed entirely to profit of off targeted advertising.

So diminishing our reliance on targeted advertising is not only great for the user, it would be truly game-changing for high-quality content providers as well. For some reason, this mutually beneficial outcome is often forgotten and I’m glad that Wired pointed it out.

Exactly. Which is what drives the biggest advertising machine anyway (Google Search). That model could be replicated for the open internet.

You don’t need targeted advertising to achieve that. You don’t need FB, Google, and a thousand other lesser-known companies tracking every step you make in order to know that you might be interested in cycling. Instead you, as a small advertiser, would target the right context and would only show your ads in articles specifically-dedicated to cycling or whatever other niche you are after.

I think it’s well defined in the article - the author means behavioural advertising that has to do with targeting any information specific to the user (whether we consider that personal or not). The proposed alternative is contextual advertising which puts the targeting emphasis entirely on the context in which the ad is shown, not on the person seeing the ad. The idea is that if it is executed correctly, contextual targeting will lead to the same person anyway, just without sacrificing his or her privacy.

Here is a recent WSJ article on the topic with a few more details in it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-af...

How many people do you think there are who are genuinely interested in hearing about opportunities to transfer wealth out of Nigeria for an unknown prince? I bet it is not a very common interest, so Google are not being lazy for not investing more manpower into it.

However, millions of people are searching about blockchain tech and are reading blockchain-related publishers every day. That is why any company which decides to censor them instead of investing resources into moderating the content is being lazy. Those companies' focus should be on their users' trust because without it they would have never achieved their bottom lines.

Because Facebook is blocking ads that will probably not be missed by many people. They still allow you to post about blockchain. Mailchimp apparently doesn't.

"They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud."

Legally speaking you are perfectly right - they can do whatever they want. But morally speaking they can't - if they have put themselves in a position where they are so popular and making so much money that it is in the general public's best interest for them to censor certain scam artists, then they should invest into content moderators. I have no idea how many people they would need to reliably sort through all the content and only block the scams. But it is the price they need to pay for deciding to censor a specific topic. Otherwise the price is being paid by all the researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiast, who have nothing to do with the scam artists.

This issue basically boils down to big corporations (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mailchimp) being too lazy to do the right thing.

I think those are two separate issues: Google has positioned itself to be the lifeline of the open internet and have profited tremendously from it. With that comes a responsibility to not censor content. Otherwise it stops being the "open" internet and becomes another walled garden with dubious rules that can change at any moment (e.g. Facebook).

Mailchimp can do whatever they want, I agree, but as their customer I wouldn't expect them to censor me in any way. They have built a very profitable business on top of a free protocol. Deciding to censor how people communicate through that protocol seems unfair.

When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to.

When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people.

What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.

A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.

I know that ICOs get a lot of negativity on HN. Sure, a lot of them deserve it, but not all ICOs are started for the sole purpose of raising cash that they otherwise wouldn't be able to raise. ICOs as a form of funding are equally likely to be manipulated as traditional VC funding following trends and hypes (one might argue that they ICO investors are even more gullible to dishonest founders since they are generally less experienced than VCs).

However, certain ICOs are actually bringing products to market that would never otherwise exist. Some of them are trying to fundamentally change how some industries operate. Others are fundamentally improving blockchain technology. But in order for their products to operate they need enough stakeholders to make them viable. And this is where ICOs come in. There were many of us who believed that Tezos was one of those ICOs. Their product could still be greatly useful if executed correctly. Given that they have raised more money then they could ever have hoped for, it is incredible that they are being silly enough to embark on a public dispute between themselves and get involved in lawsuits with their investors. Just getting back to work and executing their initial vision (which they can do many times over with that amount of funds) seems like an obvious thing to do. They would lose a lot more money (or worse) by continuing on this trajectory. It is incredible how short-term greedy they seem from the outside.

Or maybe I am missing some information that would explain this stupidity. I would love to know more.

Also, an in-wheel electrict motor would:

1. suffer a lot more from wear and tear than a motor mounted to the chassis.

2. restrain the amount of space available for brakes. While it would be reasonable to say that a small city car could forego its rear brakes and use electric motors instead to deccelerate, coupled with brakes at the front, a four wheel drive supercar with four electric motors would have no chance relying simply on the stopping power of those motors and no brakes.

3. be very difficult to connect to a powerful cooling system. Even electric motorcycles with 30-40 bhp rely on water cooling, let alone a car 20 times the weight.

4. need serious protection from water damage.

I read through the HN comments of this very same article from almost two years ago wondering whether the message of the article would have been interpreted any differently.

It is really surprising how much negativity there is in today's comments as opposed to the older topic. In 2016 people were calling this article enjoyable and even "Their favorite Google-related article of the year". I found suggestions on how to further expand on Google's work in the comments and people seem to have supported them.

Fast forward two years and in today's comments I see nothing but negativity towards the study and its achievements, criticism of the NYT journalism, and disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees.

I wonder how much of this is based on real improvements in the understanding of what makes a team work well together and how much of it is a result of the recent rise in paranoia over fake news and also distrust of corporations that are gaining power at a much faster pace than regulators can cope with. It is fascinating how a scientific study (although arguably not a very good one) can be interpreted so differently by the same group of people solely based on trends in public sentiment rather than changes in the actual evaluated metrics.

Yes, that's a comparison of the dimensions of the two backpacks.

Exactly. Plus, the range is worse by approximately 80% (depending on the DJI model), the battery life and maximum speed are lower by approximately 20%. With the camera included, it is 50% more expensive than a Phantom 3 Advanced.

On top of that the field of view of a GoPro camera is too wide for a drone, DJI have a much more adequate setup. GoPro should have at least supplied a small lens that would fix this problem.

As for portability, assuming that one would be using each brand's backpack to transport each drone, they are actually very similar in size:

GoPro: 540 x 320 x 150 mm DJI: 447 x 318 x 229

GoPro would have a much better chance if they had entered the market at the right price (~500 USD) and emphasised the qualities they are known for - durability and reliability.

SE Asia is one of the most difficult places to book a decent AriBnB in. Most of the apartments are just guesthouses in disguise, the hosts have no concept of quality accommodation (lacking basic things such as towels or sheets, overbooking houses, not cleaning up between guests), and displaying completely the wrong location on AirBnB's map. And this is unrelated to the pricing, as you can get a better daily price for the same quality of accommodation in most highly developed countries in the world.

To my surprise, AirBnB is very eager to send refunds for bad experience, instead of concentrating on removing the bad hosts and guaranteeing a minimum level of quality. I really hope that they will work harder on this, because if a first-time user tries their service in SE Asia, chances are that he or she will never consider them again. Booking and the like are far more reliable in that region.

There seems to be a large demand for a device like the Pono player, which I'm sure is great, but is not very practical - nobody needs to carry a separate player when they already have a phone with plenty of memory. Although I only listen to lossless files at home, I am certain that their benefit over regular 320 kbps mp3s on a noisy street are nonexistent. What the audiophile consumer needs is a good portable amp/DAC that would drive even high impedance headphones and that's what I like about your product.

Speaking of audiophile consumers, I tink that it would be great if you could offer two separate verisions of your product: 1. The full version that you have just released. 2. A second version, specifically aimed at people who only care about HiFi sound coming through their headphones. I don't really care about the speakers as they will never replace a proper audio system. To me they are just taking up space and it would be great if I could buy the rest of the technology in a smaller package.

One more question - I guess you'll offer Amp with a separate music player iOS app. It will probably run a few hearing tests in a quiet environment and that's how it will adopt to one's hearing. If so, will it also support various headphones? Not having to EQ the Beyerdynamic DT1350 and other cans with weird frequency response would be very helpful and will make your app bring the best out of any pair of headphones.

While the claim about "warm rich bass" on those small speakers is definitely an exaggeration, there are many Hi-Fi headphones that benefit from a portable amp-DAC combination. Many people are already carrying extra devices in their pockets for this purpose, so why not integrate tyem with the phone?

"Amp measures your hearing pattern so it can tailor to your ears" - this could also be very interesting. Especially if combined with frequency response data for a large database of headphones that would customise the sound for each one of them.

I think that it is an interesting idea with a lot of potential and am looking forward to seeing whether the actual product is good enough and catches on.

OK, I didn't know that. It's a shame.

Web crawler that collects comments on social and media websites and lets users analyse and visualise them. It's not very hard to build and provides a great service to businesses releasing PR articles and seeking feedback on them.

I would like to hear other members' opinions on this.

The concept sounds like something that could be done by high frequency charging - by increasing the frequency at which you switch the electricity on and off, you could theoretically decrease the charging time of the battery. However, the Kickstarter project doesn't mention anything about that and about the fact that you cannot put more power into the phone that is coming out of its charger.

What I suspect this device is doing is simply increasing the voltage by some small factor. Thus it would trick the phone that it is charger faster than it really would be. It would also explain why it has an iPhone and Android mode - presumably the use different algorithms to determine battery charge and selecting the right mode helps the device cheat better. If that is the case, then this could be very dangerous for a phones battery.