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alilja

I don't know what I'd use this for. But I sure am glad it exists.
This seems like a great time to post the phenomenal Everything is a Remix [1]. Part one discusses movies, part two film, and part three discusses interfaces for computers, with special emphasis on Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Mac.

1. http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

Re:Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator on Monday December 22, 2014 @01:14PM (#8784257)
You could enhance that second point by adding some noise to the function so the difficulty isn't a smooth ramp — you get some tough monsters earlier and then maybe the next group isn't as difficult.
Re:For my final project I built a sous-vide immersion cooker on Monday December 15, 2014 @05:50PM (#8754954)
Definitely after. Cooking denatures the myosin and releases water; a seared steak soaking in water isn't going to have the kind of texture you'll get (and want!) from the Maillard reaction.

I guess what I mean is that it'll taste fine but the texture won't be quite there.

Re:ARrgh: a newcomer's angry guide to R (2013) on Sunday December 14, 2014 @08:04PM (#8750222)
The worst part of R is that array indices begin at 1, and trying to get an array at 0 will fail silently by returning 0. I've spent many a night trying to figure out why all my data is wrong because my_array[0] * frame$column is returning the wrong numbers.
Not everyone measures success by money and leisure time. Especially in more creatively-derived industries, like culinary arts, I find that money has little to do with what people judge as success. Many simply want to make the best food they can.
Re:Sketchy on Sunday October 19, 2014 @11:29PM (#8480601)
The fact that he's just using canny suggests to me that it's just a simple hack he threw together. There are LOTS of other edge detection algorithms, but canny is pretty good and so easy to implement that it's the most generally used. It's not great at faces at a low resolution, but even just a little pre-processing can make the image better (as he demonstrates towards the bottom of the page).
Re:Hyperlapse, Instagram's new video stabilization app on Tuesday August 26, 2014 @12:55PM (#8228228)
There is a lot of inconsistency in gyroscope accuracy between Android devices.

The developers of Bounden posted about it here: http://gameovenstudios.com/bounden-on-android-delayed/

Re:Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? on Wednesday April 14, 2010 @12:34PM (#1265332)
What I meant was to shy away from approaches that are PURELY based on statistics if you have no background in it, because it can get overwhelming quickly.

Of course, if it's worth it to invest the time required to have a fundamental understanding of statistics, by all means do so -- but if this is a one-time or a short-term project, I'm not sure the time commitment is worth it.

Re:Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization? on Wednesday April 14, 2010 @11:36AM (#1265163)
Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book. He writes not about how to make your graphs look pretty, but how to display vast quantities of data and distill them down into useful graphics that communicate themselves effectively.

He provides examples of good and bad graphs, but more importantly, explains what exactly it is that makes those examples good and bad, and further generalizes it so you understand how to make good visualizations. If you don't want to shell out the money for it, it's probably at your library (remember those?).

Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information unless you have some background or are willing to learn about it -- it tends to be highly technical and is probably too complex for what you're trying to do. Basic stats might help you, but not as much as Tufte will.

Re:Does Apple's iPhone OS 'Game Center' Threaten Nintendo? on Friday April 09, 2010 @10:32AM (#1252761)
If the iPhone was going to threaten Nintendo, it would have done it already. Game Center-like backends are hardly uncommon on it. OpenFeint has been around for a long time, and it's pretty prevalent.
Re:Ask HN: please review my app - html to pdf API on Wednesday March 31, 2010 @05:43PM (#1233118)
Why do I need this?
This gives me that really excited feeling in my gut that I get when I see something cool. I've always wanted to learn how to play piano, but I was always overwhelmed by diving right in. This is why the iPad is going to be so cool.

Do you have plans to do this for other instruments? I can see it being enormously popular for guitar tab, especially if you can add your own tabs to it.

EDIT: Additionally, I think $3 is a perfect introductory price. If you've built a large enough following, you can leverage that to increase the price (perhaps by offering updates/large additional music libraries?) at a later date.

Re:Review my startup - Quote Feed (step 2) on Monday March 15, 2010 @04:52PM (#1194087)
Then you shouldn't be focusing on the quote itself. The quote is just an efficient preview of the material.

Focus on accurately giving people news they want, and make THAT the selling point.

I'd pay for something like this.

Re:Review my startup - Quote Feed (step 2) on Monday March 15, 2010 @04:39PM (#1194048)
So what you're REALLY providing isn't a quote-aggregation service, but rather an intelligent method of showing people content from around the internet based on how much they like a topic.

It's like Pandora but for news.

EDIT: community-powered Pandora but for news?

Re:Review my startup - Quote Feed (step 2) on Monday March 15, 2010 @03:05PM (#1193786)
I can do all of this on Tumblr -- with the exception of finding people's quotes. Sell me on why that's the killer feature.
Re:Is this another WolframAlpha joke? on Monday March 15, 2010 @03:02PM (#1193778)
Have you tried using www.google.com?
Re:Designing a Choke-free Hot Dog on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @10:48AM (#1164322)
Now I feel like a dick, re: the post above me.
Re:Ogg objections on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @10:29AM (#1164266)
Also, no one uses Ogg.
Re:Designing a Choke-free Hot Dog on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @10:28AM (#1164262)
I feel like this is another attempt of humans to avoid natural selection.
Re:Sergey Brin's Resume Pre-Google on Monday March 01, 2010 @10:32AM (#1158878)
The movie review idea is very interesting. It sounds like what Netflix is doing.

I hate to be one of those crazy predictors, but I wonder if Google will ever partner with Netflix on that topic. It seems like a good idea.

Re:Startup 3.0: How to Build a Better Web Startup on Sunday February 28, 2010 @10:06PM (#1157950)
Freemium.
Re:Did Chatroulette Just Launch the Video Conferencing Boom? on Sunday February 28, 2010 @09:56PM (#1157944)
I'm not sure this author has actually spent any amount of time on Chatroulette. The article reads as a list of video stats glued together with some exposition about the magic of the internet.

The average Chatroulette connection lasts, in my experience, roughly three seconds. If anyone started the "video conferencing boom," it was Skype and Apple, with iChat.

Re:Ask HN: Would you use this service? on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:16AM (#1120724)
Only if it can be used to add a layer to spam filters that cut this sort of message.
Re:Ask HN: Please review my new website www.favilous.com on Monday January 18, 2010 @12:47PM (#1060368)
It's a good start, but it feels like it's a bunch of unconnected ideas at this point. I think you need some better copy, but you also need to refine your layout.

Overall, it feels too busy. Items are shunted together in a confusing way, and they don't feel like they related to each other. Look at sites like http://www.pixelmator.com/ and http://feedafever.com/ -- their sites are brilliantly executed.

Focus on what you want your site to do: 1. Explain what you're offering 2. Convince people that they need it (especially as opposed to other, similar, services) 3. Make it easy to sign up and use

As it stands now, I feel like you have the rough beginnings of this, but it's not a finished, polished version.

More technically, here's what I recommend. First, you need to snap things down to a grid. This will make the page flow and FEEL better overall, and allow you to control how the user views it.

Second, you need to make everything more cohesive. It looks like you have seven different fonts now (the "favilous" name, "Bookmark Tools," the default body text, the sign-in button, the rotating text in the main box, the navigation links, and the "Follow Us" link), and a huge amount of colors. You should come up with a simple color scheme of maybe three main colors and a few shades of each, and cut the number of fonts you're using down to one or two. Yes, one or two -- the Fever page uses just one.

There seems to be a lot of empty space. Not white space, which a good design needs, but EMPTY space. Your main box looks like it's three times as big as it needs to be for the content it holds. Fix that, because it distracts the eye and looks unprofessional.

I would also recommend a color scheme that's black-on-white, instead of white-on-black you have now. It's much harder to read white text on a black background, especially for long periods of time, and since you're expecting people to be reading and browsing, you should probably focus on making it easy to read.

Finally, there are some instances on your site where you have an extra space before the punctuation ends. This looks unprofessional, and to grammar-obsessed reader, it's distracting.

Re:Apple Wouldn’t Risk Its Cool Over an Ad Gimmick, Would It? on Sunday November 15, 2009 @02:37PM (#943238)
Simple answer: no. If they use this for anything, I imagine it'll be for something similar to the iPhone, but without another company (like AT&T) backing them up financially. This allows Apple to sell something at a low price but still be financially viable.