jerryr

Ah, makes sense. The article's photo even seems to show the operator using those controls. The article mentioned voice commands specifically though, so I was reacting to that.

The Amazon echo has a pretty good microphone array, and it still has a hard time picking up my commands if there's background noise. And the background noise in factories is extreme. Notice that in the article's photos, the operator is wearing earplugs with Glass.

Using Glass in a factory environment surprises me. Factories are notoriously loud, so unless Glass is really good at filtering out background noise, I'd imagine that voice commands wouldn't work very well. My experience has mostly been consumer electronics factories in Asia, but I also see the following problems that may or may not apply to domestic factories:

* Equipment with clear resale value has a tendency to "walk away". We worked hard to avoid using consumer electronics such as PCs or phones on the line. When we did need to use them, we had to establish strict policies and secure storage for when the equipment was not in use. Glass seems like it'd fall in this category.

* Even dedicated, laser-based, handheld barcode scanners could be finicky with part labels. Camera-based scanners were unusable due to poor accuracy and latency.

* Internet connectivity is poor or non-existent. WiFi coverage is usually terrible due to physical and electrical interference from factory equipment.

AR work instructions would be a dream--especially if the technology could flag errors. The environment just seems especially hostile for consumer-oriented technology such as Glass. I don't have firsthand experience with Glass, but I'm really surprised this company is reporting success with it.

Thanks! One of these days, I'll hopefully get around to posting more.

I had the opposite experience. I created a ridiculous cooking blog to entertain family and friends. It became the #1 result for the phrase, "how to sort lentils." And it was brought to my attention yesterday in another HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13875755), that Google is now presenting it as the One True Answer for sorting lentils. My site is absurd, so hopefully would-be lentil sorters get a good chuckle and move on. But this Google feature seems broken if it's promoting bad information.

Ooh. That does seem a little irresponsible on Google's part, and a bit less funny now. Thanks for the link!

That...is spectacular. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I can die happy now that I've contributed facts. How did they pick that particular excerpt, I wonder.

Yup. That's it.

Edit: And this is the post that Fox was planning to reference in their story (if you're short on time, scroll past the blather and just enjoy the photos. Like they did): http://www.porkulent.com/2013/11/how-to-prepare-coffee/

Agreed. I created a humorous cooking site that quickly became the #1 google result for, "how to sort lentils." It still gets a lot of hits from poor souls who are trying to figure out what that vague "sort the lentils" instruction in their recipe means.

Later, I posted an article that proposed smoking coffee like crack. A Fox News station actually contacted me when they were working on a piece about teens smoking coffee to get high. They quickly dropped the conversation when I pointed out that the site is not a serious news source--as is evidenced by the fact that every posting is absurd.

I agree with your points, especially around price point. However, a large part of hitting a price point is volume and negotiating power. Startups have neither (Kickstarter numbers aren't high enough to see a significant price drop), so--whether or not they're done domestically--the first runs of product are usually subsidized by investment anyways. Investment should also cover the R&D. If, as a startup, you're funding your R&D largely from pre-sales, I'd maintain that you don't have enough money.

Edit: Also, to your point about going big or bust--I think that's fine as long as the reason for bust is market powers beyond your control. But to bust before launch because you didn't have a viable plan/resources to get through manufacturing is just a shame.

Edit 2: I should mention that I see small domestic runs as one way to deal with the manufacturing problem. Another is to simplify the product for your first run. Another is to raise more money. They all have tradeoffs and I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution. I didn't mean to imply that.

As samfisher83 pointed out, $34M was in escrow, so they were probably running on closer to $15M. When setting up a volume production line for a complicated product, it's really easy to burn through tens of millions of dollars. Kickstarter scares the crap out of me for this reason. Typically, I would recommend that a startup begin with a small domestic run of the simplest product possible, targeted at an early adopter market. There's so much a startup has to put into place for hardware: a contract manufacturer (and a sane contract, which takes time to establish), suppliers, supply chain, testing (development and production), certification, packaging, sales channels, distribution, support, reverse logistics, etc. Companies such as PCH, Dragon, etc. can help accelerate some of this, but there's still a ton of work to do. Trying to simultaneously tackle all of that and a complicated engineering design requires a ton of resources--more than a typical startup will have.

Setting up a reliable manufacturing line and test procedure typically takes about 6 months from the time your engineering team begins handoff to the contract manufacturer. Moreover, as much as we'd like it to be, manufacturing is not agile. All of that work is very change-intolerant. So, if you begin the handoff with a half-baked design (which most startups do, in my experience) that you have to change as you proceed through the setup process, you can easily blow away that nominal, 6-month timeline with tooling changes, contract renegotiation, supplier verification, etc. as your engineers scramble to work with the factory to make the design manufacturable and cost-effective.

Jumping straight into a full-blown manufacturing effort is not a cash-effective way for a startup to prove a complicated design. You can force it to work, but it's really expensive. Apple, for example, parallel-paths a lot of stuff. They can afford to discard a million-dollar tool and move on if it doesn't work out. They also send huge engineering teams to Asia for months at a time. Instead, I'd suggest that startups begin with more manual domestic builds in the low hundreds of units until the engineering team is confident in the manufacturability of the design and the manufacturing requirements are understood. These will, of course, have much higher per-unit costs, but you can iterate way, way faster because you're not constantly flying overseas to battle the inertia of a manufacturing line.

Unfortunately, Kickstarter--while still qualifying as an early adopter market--is driving first-run numbers way higher than they should be for the average startup, which is causing them to jump too quickly into scale manufacturing efforts. Because of this, I think we are seeing some spectacular failures such as Lily.

tl;dr: Manufacturing is expensive. Kickstarter is driving hardware startups into manufacturing too soon.

I really like the Breville Smart Oven series. I've owned several, but I currently have the Smart Oven Pro and use it more than our actual oven. It heats up quickly, cooks very evenly, and the UI is straightforward. My only problem with it is that the UI frequently suffers from button bounce. Often, when I press the start button to turn the oven on, the bounce causes it to turn right back off again. And it can be occasionally difficult to dial in precise times due to similar issues with the knobs. Breville needs to learn how to properly debounce their hardware buttons--many of their products suffer from this. Overall, I'm really happy with it though.

For a "get them writing" idea, I'd personally love a secure, cross-platform (including different mobile and desktop platforms, though I'd be happy with iOS/Mac OS for starters), journaling app that syncs without using a service that's proprietary to the app. I like Day One (http://dayoneapp.com), but hate that it's not properly encrypted and that it uses their proprietary service. What I think I want is the functionality of Day One with the sync options and security of 1Password. That would give me the confidence to pour my head into a daily journal. And, as far as I know, it doesn't exist.

Edit: Hm. I googled a little after posting and realized that my comment about Day One not being "properly encrypted" might be incorrect. It was based upon my experience with v1 of Day One. It looks like v2 added encryption and it was further improved with v2.1--though I can't speak to the strength of their implementation and can't find anyone who claims to have audited it. And they still only appear to support their own sync service.

Another advantage of typedefing the function is that you can let the compiler help ensure your function definition signatures are correct.

For example, if you typedef a callback type like so:

  typedef int callback_t(int foo);

And then declare a callback like so:

  callback_t my_callback;

And then later define the callback like so:

  int my_callback(int foo) {
    ...
  }

The compiler will produce an error if you screw up the function signature of my_callback() when defining it because it won't match the prototype you defined via the typedef. This only works in C. C++ allows multiple function signatures for the same function name, so you probably won't get a compiler error--though you'll likely wind up with a linker error.

Edit: The downside is that function declarations done this way will look a little odd--possibly mistaken for a variable definition. And, upon further thought, I'm not sure that this pattern really is a huge benefit since function pointer assignment will also produce an error if the signatures don't match. But interesting nonetheless, I guess.

Thanks! Unfortunately, the page currently uses Hover's "stealth redirect" which embeds the profane URL in an iframe. So, if the profane URL is actually blocked by content filtering, you probably still won't be able to access it.

I'm actively working on the page. Once it stabilizes, I'll consider mirroring a sanitized version instead of using the "stealth redirect".

Do you have, in mind, superior works that deal with similar concepts? I'm looking for new reading material & would appreciate more author/book recommendations.

I'd argue that the technology for digging up city streets hasn't needed to improve (though the politics around zoning/regulation/rights probably could); whereas, the technology for fixed wireless has--by leaps and bounds. But I argue this lightly because it detracts from my original question: Is fixed wireless the future of Google Fiber in SF? I'm not presupposing an answer, nor am I equipped to make a value judgement on said answer. Just curious & felt my parents' question deserved discussion, not downvotes.

I'm surprised by your downvotes. While "zero chance" might be a bit dramatic, it seems like this warrants discussion. Does this mean that Google thinks P2P wireless is the way to cover urban areas? Will it disincentivize them from persevering through a city-wide fiber installation because P2P wireless is "good enough"? Or is it a good opening play for fiber in SF because Webpass was already navigating the zoning/regulation/rights and just needed capital to succeed? I'd be very interested to hear others' perspectives on this.

Disclosure edit: I'm a current Webpass P2P wireless customer. I was literally about to switch away from Webpass to another P2P wireless solution (we have a site evaluation next Monday) because Webpass has been unreliable for us lately. I'm really curious what, if anything, this means for Webpass and Google Fiber in SF.

Yeah, I believe it is too. And its primary scripting language is still DelphiScript. We use it daily at my company.

This seems like a surprising level of openness for Apple. This document is targeted at custom band/case manufacturers. I'm fairly certain that similar iPhone/iPad specs have previously only been available through very closed programs.

I'm unclear though, on whether you can make your own lugs. Historically, Apple has allowed 3rd party accessories, but has effectively charged a licensing fee by requiring the purchase of enabling hardware (30-pin connector, Lightning connector, Authentication Co-processor). I'd assume Apple wants you to buy Apple lugs, but it's unclear on whether Apple's lugs are a requirement or a convenience.

Bunnie Huang used an FPGA on a pretty fast bus to extract the XBox's ROM. Granted, that's no longer a "modern" CPU, but still interesting.

See the "Update on ROM extraction and decryption" section here: http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/proj/anatak/xboxmod.html

More info here: http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/proj/anatak/AIM-2002-008.pdf

And in his book: http://www.nostarch.com/xboxfree

Yes. The while statement can't take variable arguments. Also, ellipsis is not a standalone expression. Also, if "fileSize" is exactly 8192 then ellipsis will execute because "bytesRemaining" will equal zero. If your compiler actually compiles ellipsis and "fileSize" is exactly 8192, then something bad will probably happen. Either the undefined behavior of the compiled ellipses or the unexpected negative number will likely cause a crash.

Edit: I guess that was funnier in my head.

Agreed! Securing stuff is NOT an easy problem--especially cost constrained, embedded goods. Having worked on multiple connected device projects now (including Square's first encrypted reader--but that was one of the more rigorous efforts I've seen), I'd say there's not much communication in our industry & everyone seems to roll their own security. It's disastrous & I'm not certain what the solution is. Only companies with obvious liability issues seem to bother with security consultants such as Matasano. The rest wing it with reference designs and code scraped from dubious places. So, when articles like this surface, I'm fascinated, but not surprised. BTW, this problem is only going to get worse with the IoT boom.

I have nothing but respect for what you do, Thomas. I wish everyone I've worked with had access to your services. Could you maybe help TI wrap it all up into a hardware block in the next generation of MSP430s? :)

MindTribe - San Francisco, CA

Like hacking on hardware & prefer work diversity? We're looking for:

Senior Electrical - http://www.mindtribe.com/jobs/electrical-engineer-senior

Senior Mechanical - http://www.mindtribe.com/jobs/mechanical-engineer-senior

Senior Firmware - http://www.mindtribe.com/jobs/firmware-engineer-senior

Technician - http://www.mindtribe.com/jobs/technician

We're a tight-knit team of engineers developing hardware products for clients. Our specialty is consumer electronics and connected devices. Our past projects include the Tesla Roadster, Square Reader and Stand, and the recently-launched Adobe Ink and Slide (http://www.adobe.com/products/ink-and-slide.html).

I can't recall which, but I have seen at least one compiler generate code like this (if I had to guess, I'll bet it was either Dynamic C for Rabbit 2000 or an old Bytecraft compiler for an ancient Cypress architecture). Though I've worked with a lot of old, primitive compilers & it's possible it only did this with optimizations off.

At Mindtribe, our coding style suggests "for(;;)" instead of "while(1)". However, the reason isn't performance. Instead, it's that we've seen more than one compiler produce a warning about the testing of a constant in the case of "while(1)". And we have a policy of compiling without warnings.

Because the OP continues to receive points for the modified title/URL, it seems as though the current system incentivizes "first to post", not "highest quality". Would it be better if the mods could more aggressively sink poor content with weighted downvotes? This way, the original submission remains attributed to the OP--title and all. If it's a bad/misleading title, secondary source, etc. it might be briefly interesting, but then modded down in favor of better content. But if it remains interesting to the community, it could remain afloat with enough upvotes. It seems like this system would be fair in terms of attribution while incentivizing people to submit primary sources with good titles.

Sorry to bikeshed here, but curious why it doesn't work this way? Too much work? Is there too much luck involved in making it to the front page & mods are interested in changing poor content into good content rather than hoping the good content will eventually make it there itself?

Sorry to reach back to the mid-aughts, but I found myself clicking through Wikipedia and landing on Steorn's entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn

What was up with that? Srsly. The Wikipedia entry is unsatisfying. Rational Me says, "Yes, they're obviously a fraud...and they found some gullible people to behoax" but Irrational Me says, "How can I get me some of that?" Interpretation of "How can I get me some of that?" left as an exercise for the reader.

tl;dr::someone pays a lot to get everyone excited about (another) free energy theory, hides proof behind paywall. Is this a viable model for the unscrupulous?

MindTribe - San Francisco, CA

We're looking for:

Senior Electrical - http://www.mindtribe.com/jobs/electrical-engineer-senior

Senior Mechanical - http://www.mindtribe.com/jobs/mechanical-engineer-senior

Senior Firmware - http://www.mindtribe.com/jobs/firmware-engineer-senior

Technician - http://www.mindtribe.com/jobs/technician

We're a tight-knit team of engineers developing hardware products for clients. Our specialty is consumer electronics and connected devices. Our past projects include the Tesla Roadster, Square Reader and Stand, and the recently-launched Adobe Ink and Slide (http://www.adobe.com/products/ink-and-slide.html).

I see the same problem on iPhone Safari with iOS 7.1.1. Just keeps refreshing.

MindTribe - San Francisco, CA

We make hardware. We’re looking for senior firmware engineers to join the team!

The hard requirements are brief: 5+ years of writing code for embedded systems with experience leading projects. At Mindtribe we code most often in C. In addition to technical work, our senior engineers plan projects, lead teams of engineers, and mentor junior members.

At this point, you can tackle most technical challenges that come your way. The rest you could figure out given enough time. You’re starting to grow into someone who can elevate an entire team – not just by adding engineering horsepower, but by multiplying the abilities of those around you. You could probably get a job anywhere you want. Why Mindtribe?

As a product development consultancy, we get to peek inside a lot of exciting companies. That’s how we know there’s nowhere else we’d rather be.

Nobody sees the kind of variety that we do. Working at Mindtribe is being immersed in a constant stream of projects across different industries using different technologies. You will learn. A lot. About everything. Mindtribers are not just versatile within their own fields – “firmware” engineers work with everything from 8-bit micros to embedded Linux to smartphones – we also have EE’s driving SolidWorks, ME’s developing iOS apps, and FW engineers laying out PCB’s. You’ll iterate through many careers-worth of projects and solutions faster than you thought possible. And you’ll get better at it each time.

Everyone here loves hardware, so much that we’ve been known to spend leisure time on projects that aren’t so different from what we do at work. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. We may code in bits and bytes, but we work in the real world. Our desks are cluttered with dev boards and prototypes. We work shoulder-to-shoulder with teammates, discuss our work throughout each day, and build amazing things together. We’re constantly in front of clients to extract feedback, plot course corrections, and lead the way.

Mindtribe succeeds by putting forward strong teams with sound methods. While we consider ourselves talented engineers, relying on heroic individual efforts to meet impossible deadlines is a painful way to squeak by. Instead, our edge comes from constant introspection about how we do engineering, and we are always looking for ways to improve. Things that are broken here don’t stay that way for long.

We’re a small company. As a result, your contributions will have immediate, visible impacts not just on projects, but also on the success of the entire organization. Although we all swab the decks, everyone also gets to help steer.

Mindtribe is located in the heart of downtown San Francisco, convenient to public transit and at the epicenter of a flourishing technology industry. We enjoy working together and place great value in maintaining an awesome company environment. ‘Tribers regularly spend time together outside the office, whether that’s doing happy hour at a local watering hole or enjoying the rocking chairs at the new Exploratorium.

For more information about us, check out our team (http://www.mindtribe.com/team), our portfolio (http://www.mindtribe.com/portfolio), and our method (http://www.mindtribe.com/method).

If this is resonating, we’d love to get to know you! Please drop us a line at nopnjmp@mindtribe.com to tell us how you’ve demonstrated leadership in your career and why you’d be excited to do what we do.