opticalflow

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
105
Submissions
68
Member since
May 11
CTO of a video technology company in business 7 years. Location(s): Milford PA, NYC https://www.linkedin.com/in/wgaddy
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 7 years ago
I'm cracking 50, and I can't even imagine "retiring". In addition to my dayjob (which is plenty rewarding) I also volunteer for FEMA, Skywarn, ARES, and ARRL. Also looking to get my EMT cert. If I sat around on some beach somewhere drinking Pina Coladas I would probably lose my freekin' mind out of boredom.
Comment · 7 years ago
I hate the term "AI" (even though I am CTO of a company with "AI" in its name, but since we use machine learning/DCNNs in our systems, it’s very trendy). The problem with "AI" is the "intelligence" part. Intelligence is a construct like "porn", like in the famous words of Justice Stewart about defining the latter "...but I know it when I see it". At best, it's very ambiguous -- and misleading at worst. They have been many attempts to quantitatively and qualitatively define intelligence -- none of which I find particularly satisfying and neither do any three given scientists in a room agree on a single interpretation. My problem with TFA is that it is comparing apples to oranges; deep convolutional networks are very different tools useful for a subset of problems than the ones using Bayesian inference and other statistical methods. Brute force methods like image morphology, object counting, and transforms are useful for even yet an entire Other set of problems. To say that one has displaced another is an error, in fact in most useful, modern, production systems a combination of all three is utilized, each to their purpose. To make direct comparisons between them while implying the historical decisions to use one or the other are due to Moore's Law is a false equivalence.

I clearly need my morning coffee.

Comment · 8 years ago
I took five years of Spanish -- high school and university (I thought I'd since forgotten it, this was 30 years ago). A few years ago I found myself in Barcelona for a week. First day, I was completely lost. By the end of my stay I found it had come back to me, at least for rudimentary conversation. I even picked up a little Catalan. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a former boss. He asked if I spoke Italian. I said no. "But you speak some Spanish, right?" To wit I sheepishly said, "yeah but it's been a long time". Then he rattles off something in Italian and asks "What did I just ask?" .. "Something about wanting 4 glasses of Tignanello wine for the table" And he says: "See? You have enough to be in the conversation, or at least listen. Talking is overrated, anyway..."
Comment · 8 years ago
This is not a lenticular display. It's a stack of 45 independent transparent TFTs.
Comment · 8 years ago
I'm CTO of a machine learning/computer vision company, and quite a bit of the team's work is "gluing libraries together" -- but even so, it's an intensely interesting, rapidly evolving field. Plus I get to play with pixels and cameras and VR. That being said, I paid my dues in the 90's and early 2000's doing web services and boring J2EE and gluing Java to native and PHP to Perl to CGI [bleech]
Comment · 8 years ago
I'd say there's a competition problem in that there are too many very poorly made "me-too's" that aren't even worth the 30 bucks. The Yi's come pretty close quality-wise to GoPro, have excellent build quality -- and frankly I like the Yi optics better than GoPro's... but they ain't 30 bucks. Disclaimer: I used to design camera systems and used to work in Hollywood so I can tell the s* from the Shinola, so I consider myself fairly picky.
Comment · 8 years ago
All and all a good intro tutorial that gets into some of the common professional use cases. On "constant bitrate" assumptions and some of the subsequent discussion here, ANY transform-and-entropy codec like VP9 or H264 will ALWAYS be variable bitrate internally. In the pro broadcast world, where you can't go over your FCC-allocated radio frequency bandwidth allocation by even one iota (or nastygrams and fines ensue), this is "handled" by actually having the encoder understoot the actual target (say it's 5mbit), and then the stream is padded with null packets to get a nice even 5mbit/s. This also happens with LTE broadcast as well. The encoders that do this reliably are fabulously expensive and of a rackmount flavor.
Comment · 8 years ago
They have a Yi 4k+ kit with a waterproof action case, much like the GoPro Hero line does.
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
So, I wonder how many ad placements were made by these companies that specifically targeted experienced talent OVER 40 years of age? I'm going to guess a big, fat, zero.
Comment · 9 years ago
I used to work for a smallish (<50 headcount) company that sold high-value software with a LOT of secret sauce in it (image processing algorithms) mostly to telco, wireless, and MSOs. The primary reason those folks wanted the source code was as insurance that if, as a smallish company, you went out of business, they would be jolly-well-rogered if they had deployed your stuff in the middle of their mission-critical revenue-generating operations. Our solution was always to use a mutually agreed third-party source code escrow service such as Iron Mountain. The only escrow release triggers were company insolvency/bankruptcy, or refusal to meet the SLA of support requests for an extended period of time (the -Off Clause).
Comment · 9 years ago
It's an interesting conundrum (for my family at least). My father was very highly educated (Professor Emeritus of semiconductor physics/EE at a major University, you've likely heard of it). I started out putting a couple of years in toward a BSCE at that same University, but I abandoned it because I already had work experience, and the BSCE was just a consolation prize -- the only value it would have had is if I was going to pursue a doctorate/academic career. That would have come with a prospect of a lot of student debt. As it turned out, I ended up in a career making more than a trauma surgeon, but without a mountain of $250K student loans. Today, I have 6 kids, and the two oldest are at the ages where they need to contemplate college. One definitely has their sights on University, the other is ambivalent. What I tell all of them is that there is nothing wrong with wanting to become an Electrician, Plumber, Pipefitter or any of the other work trades. All are worthy careers and can be very lucrative.
Comment · 9 years ago
Well, articles like this don't "Upset Me", but I appreciate them nonetheless. In the end, it starts with awareness, but ends in full action. In the meantime, I find myself making conscious choices like "You know, instead of the burger, I'll go for the caprese salad with the fresh moozarel". Not all the time, but more than I did a few years ago. In the aggregate, even small choices like this occasionally by thousands (or millions) or people can make a big impact.
Comment · 9 years ago
Here, I fixed it for you:

if (globalservices) {

    yourescrewed=0;

    upgradeprobability=0.25f;

    bumpprobability=0.0f;
} else if (united1k) {

    yourescrewed=1;

    upgradeprobability=0.10f;

    bumpprobability=0.01f;
} else if (unitedplatinum) {

    yourescrewed=1;

    upgradeprobability=0.05f;

    bumpprobability=0.05f*(1-premiumeconomy*0.5);
} else if (unitedgold) {

    yourescrewed=1;

    upgradeprobability=0.001f;

    bumpprobability=0.10f*(1-premiumeconomy*0.5);
} else if (unitedsilver) {

    yourescrewed=2;

    upgradeprobability=0.000001f;

    bumpprobability=0.10f;
} else if (any_other_schmuck) {

    yourescrewed=NaN;

    go_f_yourself=1*(united_basic_economy);

    assault_probability=0.01f;

    upgradeprobability=0.0f;

    bumpprobability=0.20f;

    baggage_fees=1;

}
Comment · 9 years ago
Well, all I can say as a former Continental Platinum (and later United 1K) is that the combination has resulted in the uttermost cesspool of service, fees, annoyances, and outright insults (thanks for stranding me overnight in Louisville KY on my way home to NJ and not even giving me a voucher for a hotel!). Anything they can do to improve service is fine in my book, but I'm not holding my breath. And just don't get me started on upgrades, delays, and bumps... let's just say I never fly United unless it's a direct flight.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton