Disqus - Latest Comments for marcusv

Re: DJI’s New Mini 4K Drone Doesn’t Require a License and Is Just $299

Marcus — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 17:19:49 -0000

Pretty sure you're right about this.

Re: Photographing a Pacific Wren in the Redwood Forests of California

Marcus — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 21:15:24 -0000

I saw the thumbnail and was like "this looks exactly like a Ray Hennessy photo!" With good reason. Great to see you here!

Re: Extracting Hacker News Book Recommendations with the ChatGPT API

Marcus — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 10:50:11 -0000

Meditations mentioned on HN is most likely Marcus Aurelius, not Descartes. Just a guess :)

Re: Levi’s to Use AI-Generated Models to ‘Increase Diversity’

Marcus — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 11:28:59 -0000

No kidding. How blind/condescending do they have to be to believe that their customers would fall for this? It's clear to everyone that this is to save time and money. They should just say that.

Re: Annie Leibovitz Named IKEA’s Latest Artist in Residence

Marcus — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 18:29:42 -0000

> even though she has trouble shooting non white skin

Just to clarify, are you questioning her technical ability to photograph non-white skin or are you calling her a racist?

Re: Gear Review: Sony 200-600 f/5.6-6.3 G Telephoto Lens

Marcus — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 16:46:24 -0000

Thanks for this review. I've looked at a lot of other reviews for this lens but none with photos this awesome to go along with them. That image of the salmon jumping into the bear's mouth is epic! Nicely done.

I currently use an Olympus 300mm f/4 which I love, but I'm starting to become envious of the auto-focus abilities of the Sony system and wouldn't mind the smaller DoF from a full frame. The biggest concern I have with the Sony 200-600 is the 2 stops of light on the long end. I'm just not sure that the better ISO performance on the full frame sensor will make up for it. Guess there's only one way to really find out...

Thanks again for the review.

Re: AvaTax Software Development Kit

Marcus — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 18:01:59 -0000

Hi Patrick,
Would mind helping me understand what exactly you're looking to learn? I'd love to help out. The rubydocs (https://www.rubydoc.info/gi... have documentation for every method in the gem. In addition, there are inline comments on every method in the gem's source code. You can also find documentation for the general Avatax API here: https://developer.avalara.c...

If you're having issues getting setup, please refer to the example folder that has a basic example of going from nothing to a request / response https://github.com/avadev/A....

Anything else we can do to improve the docs?

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 14:48:39 -0000

There's no free alternative that I'm aware of. You can use expanded mode in The Brain to see more than the immediate nodes.

Re: Shooting Grassroots-Level Auto Racing

Marcus — Sat, 15 Jul 2017 19:54:25 -0000

Love them. Very engaging, nostalgic feeling images.

Re: An example of flow in Anna Karenina

Marcus — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 14:45:00 -0000

Nice Paul, I haven't heard of that one, I'll check it out!

Re: True HEX Colors with NeoVim and iTerm2 - Schlink's Coding Adventures

Marcus — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 17:31:16 -0000

Thanks! This was one of my last sticking points for not moving to neovim. Things are looking good now.

Re: Summary of The Irresistible Offer

Marcus — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 14:41:08 -0000

Tom,
Thanks! Since I don't know you, I'm just going to be blunt and say that your offer isn't really that compelling. The price is low and sure, 5 minutes is fast, but there are so many virtual assistant companies out there that price and speed aren't what I am concerned about. My first thought that something so cheap and fast is probably going to be next to useless.

Sell me on what the your assistants can do. "Awesome" isn't enough.

You've probably seen Magic+ - this is an irresistable offer! https://getmagicnow.com/plus

I don't even really need an assistant but I want to use them just to try it, even with the ridiculously high price.

Good luck! Hope you nail it.

Re: Whom He May Devour - Issue 32: Space - Nautilus

Marcus — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 19:34:10 -0000

Great story. I like that it's not quite a defense of colonialism but comes close to it. It's also a really cool take on the potential dark side of an AI that had self-preservation as its strongest value.

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 12:46:54 -0000

Very interesting. This sounds a lot like how I use TheBrain in terms of organizing stuff, but TheBrain completely missing the natural language aspects of your system. It seems a little tedious to have to define linguistics for every notebook, couldn't it almost always be inferred based on the title? That seems like something Wolfram Language could probably do out of the box.

Also, someone linked to this video in the comments on Hacker News. It may give you additional ideas, I know it's gotten me thinking: https://www.youtube.com/wat...

Very cool system you have there, it's hard to imagine exactly how it works without seeing it, but it sounds pretty effective.

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 16:59:54 -0000

At the time I was using it it was front-end only. The file size got big and it started to slow the entire browser window down. I just read in another comment that it can be node-backed, so that should largely be mitigated.

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 16:59:01 -0000

Nice! I didn't even know that was an option.

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 16:58:44 -0000

I think visualization is something that you don't know you'll miss until you have it. That said, it sounds like Cintanotes works great for you and if that's the case, stick with it!

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 16:57:07 -0000

Willlma, I see what you're saying with the expectation of no learning curve and the tendency to jump to whatever is new and shiny only to be faced with the inevitable difficulty of maintenance once it grows big, whatever "it" is.

I don't think low learning curve and powerful maintenance tools are mutually exclusive, TheBrain is actually pretty successful in that regard, but most other tools don't even try. Either way though, it does require effort and you have a point that most people probably aren't invested in their tools enough to put in the effort.

I've been using Hibou for a couple days, a friend recommended it to me after seeing an early version of this article. I haven't used it enough to say for sure that I'll stick with it, but my initial impressions are very positive. I use Anki for learning languages and I really like how Hibou is essentially a no-effort card creation system for everything else. I'm excited to see if it leads to the type of results you describe. I'd love to see it work inside of Marvin or Hyphen on iOS and I bet the devs of either of those two apps would be willing to do it.

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 00:35:38 -0000

A personal knowledgebase shouldn't be about hoarding information or redundantly saving stuff that you can easily find online. It's more about keeping a record of what you've come across and how it's relevant to you, your work and things you're interested in.

If I add a Wikipedia article to my PK, it's because I want to relate the article to something else I'm interested in. Once there's enough stored in a PK, patterns start to emerge and ideas for new projects, stories, articles, etc. start to form.

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 00:14:20 -0000

I'd never heard of Cintanotes, it looks pretty interesting. It seems like it has good search and an interesting presentation, but lacks a good visualization of the relationships between notes and like you mentioned, is unfortunately Windows only.

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 15:19:06 -0000

Alex, I agree, that would be a killer feature.

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 15:17:02 -0000

Vladimir, I also use Evernote but I find that when I put stuff in, I almost never see it again. Sometimes it shows up in the "related notes", but mostly it's just a black hole unless I specifically search for something.

The ability to add and visualize relationships between notes is the biggest thing that Evernote and OneNote are missing. You can put stuff in and search for it, but options for structuring information are very limited.

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 14:47:35 -0000

I have used Tiddlywiki some and for what it is, it's really cool. It doesn't work as a general purpose knowledgebase for me though because everything is stored in one file and it gets unwieldy quickly. After several years use, my current knowledgebase has 10k+ notes in it and is over 1gb when you include attachments.

Re: The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

Marcus — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 14:25:04 -0000

Thanks! That's a cool one that I'd never seen. I like outlines, but I feel like there are so many better ways to visualize and structure information that they miss out on. TheBrain comes closer to how my brain things about information organization.

Linking from one note to another one that is deeply nested elsewhere is difficult with outlines.

Re: Bauhaus Ballard

Marcus — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 22:06:14 -0000

Bauhaus is a fantastic place to work. There are outlets everywhere (look under the counter by the windows), friendly staff and it's almost always easy to find a place to sit. WiFi has been reliable and decently fast every time I've been there.