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kaib

660 karma · joined November 10, 2009

Founder and CEO of Airstone Labs. We work on supercomputers. If you are interested in hard systems engineering problems get in touch, we are hiring in San Francisco. @KaiBackman on twitter. kai@airstone.io
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kaib··on Airline flights of the world visualized with WebGL
More specifically when the user clicks on a specific point on the planet and moves the mouse cursor you want that point to still be under the cursor when the mouse button is released. You can extend this construct outside the central sphere into a camera control that works across the screen and feels very intuitive at any zoom level.

Google "sgi trackball" for some interesting code to point the way.

kaib··on The great forgetting
YMMV. My first memories start as a trickle before the first year growing to a torrent starting from 12 months and forward. My sister hardly remembers anything before the age of 10. :-)
kaib··on Lightweight Azure InfiniBand Cluster Setup
I'm actually interested in a bit more detail as well.

I've seen a few different fabrics in production (including proprietary non-public ones) and while I'm not sure IB is the answer Ethernet certainly has quite a few performance limitations.

kaib··on Leaving Go
Does Ken count as a Systems C programmer?

Most of the systems C programmers I know, who admittedly work on large distributed systems, like Go.

kaib··on New axe design uses lever action to make splitting wood easier
Can you elaborate on this? Having split a lot of wood it's not clear this design is affected by handedness.
kaib··on Spatial Data Structures for Better Map Interactions
> And the most advanced algorithm family for indexing point-like data is not in the literature at all.

Don't leave us comp geom geeks hanging.. Which one are you referring to? :-)

kaib··on Toward Go 1.3
It works fine. When I did the initial implementation of the Go ARM compiler I mostly used my phone as a debug environment. Android was probably the only Linux distro where the compiler worked when 1.0 was released.
kaib··on Trying To Woo Animators, Disney Accidentally Invents “The Paperman Method”
This is subtle but extremely interesting.

Input for computer graphics is very very hard. I've seen some great design work up close (Tinkercad) and this is one of the most interesting concepts in a while.

kaib··on Architect's Dream House: Less Than 200 Square Feet
Having been raised in a cold and isolated country (Finland) I think you incorrectly assume that means a lot of time spent indoors. This can be true, but does not have to.

I do think you are on to something with the idea of pods, most farmhouses where I come from are arranged in a number of small separate buildings.

kaib··on Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy?
I would actually like to know if we could hire him.. :-)
kaib··on Go 1.2 is released
Why wouldn't split stacks work on SPARC, is there something about the architecture that makes it impossible?
kaib··on Four years of Go
That is almost doable, but would be exceptional unless your name is Rob, Robert or Ken. I think I could almost claim 9 years at that point, conveniently ignoring the fact I stopped coding a few years back.. :-)
kaib··on The Reliability of Go
I'll counter your anecdotal evidence with my anecdotal evidence. I know a few systems guys who have three or more decades of experience with statically typed languages who prefer Go. :-)
kaib··on A 3D printed toothbrush for all your teeth
Many of the tools are actually reused again and again. However, between uses they are sterilized using an autoclave and then immediately put into sealed bags to maintain sterility.
kaib··on Go for System Administrators
My impression is that static linking is undervalued by developers who have not been responsible for the production deployment of binaries to larger (hundreds or hundreds of thousands of systems). When debugging production systems at that scale you want to minimize the number of moving parts given the problem is so hard to begin with.

ABI compatibility just postulates that the bytes entering and leaving the interface will be marshalled the same way. However, the semantics of the function must by definition always change when you change the implementation.

You are arguing that these semantic changes are sometimes inconsequential, like for security updates. Based on my personal experience I think a more conservative view is appropriate and any changes to the dependencies of a program should be tested before large scale deployment.

kaib··on Ben Horowitz: Capital market climate change
Extrapolating from your use of "they" and the implied "us" I'm guessing that you haven't worked in the role of a CEO yourself. Taking that responsibility for a few years might not increase your respect for individuals but it will increase your respect for the difficulty of the job.
kaib··on The ARM server apocalypse
One important observation is that the interconnect out of the Phi cards is note very good. While the interconnect inside Phi is pretty good the bandwidth to communicate with other computing facilities is through the PCIe bus. This places the Phi cards close to GPU's very good at graphics and a few specialized problems like protein folding but not supercomputers that can tackle hard problems like sparse matrix solving.
kaib··on San Francisco
The comment on schools is incorrect. The school system changed a year back and now you have a very high chance of making it to your neighborhood school. This is both from reading the system description and first hand accounts from friends with kids going to Kindergarden.

Noe Valley is pretty nice and it's hard to say if it's more expensive than say Mountain View in the south.

kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
I think we might have something out of interest for Wellposed. Fire me an email at kai@airstonelabs.com and lets talk more.
kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
The short answer is no, we only started selling the assets three weeks ago, a few months after announcing the shutdown.

The longer answer is that selling part of your business while continuing in a business that is in any way related is usually very challenging from a legal standpoint. The lawyers call it the "spaghetti effect", basically the IP tends to be really tangled. We had serendipitous developments a few weeks back in how Airstone is built which let us create a hermetic barrier between the Airstone and Tinkercad IP's. Before that happened we had no way of selling the IP without taking an unacceptable risk.

kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
Thanks! We are very happy with the outcome as well.
kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
Deal terms were not disclosed. That said Airstone is planning to fund development using the acquired funds.
kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
Autodesk engineering will take over all Tinkercad development. We are working on transitioning everything over, Autodesk has built a very strong and dedicated team to support Tinkercad.

Airstone development will continue as before.

kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
I'm not privy to the AutoCAD roadmap but I would expect them to integrate with the consumer apps first.
kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
This was a pure asset deal, no personnel moved to Autodesk. The team will continue working full time on Airstone.
kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
Can you please mail team@tinkercad.com with your login email and we will look into it. Sounds like a bug.
kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
We did a quick deploy to fix one account class that hadn't been moved to the new free plan. The site is back up again.

Edit: The site was down for 3 min and 32 s.

kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
Are you talking about exporting model data or doing 3D printing from within AutoCAD?
kaib··on TinkerCAD reopens, purchased by AutoDesk
I'm Kai, one of the founders of Tinkercad. If anyone has questions I'm happy to answer here.
kaib··on Tesla Raises $1B from Stock and Bond Sale
Owning less of a much larger pie does seems sensible from a monetary standpoint. It seems like you are optimizing for percentage ownership of the company instead of actual value of your stake?
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