kentlyons

I want this at the programming language level too. If a function call can fail, I want to set a flag and have it (randomly?) fail. I hacked my way around this by adding in some wrapper that would if random, err for a bunch of critical functions. It was great for working through a ton of race conditions in golang with channels, and remote connections, etc. But hacking it in manually was annoying and not something I'd want to commit.

Or just use voice to set the wiper speed - completely eyes free

Regenerative breaking with the right EV could make a huge difference here. I use my breaks way way less now than with a traditional car.

One of my favorite personal commits was removing about 5000 lines of dead code tightly woven into many other parts of the overall codebase.

I made an attachment for my Ender 3 3D printer that allowed me to turn it into a pen plotter and draw with ink (and other) pens. I've played around with different code to create images (photo->gcode) and made a new youtube channel for the drawings and a bit of behind the scenes of how they're made: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfqDAVieav-UOIEAlDXsovQ

I've been making progress with my art project. I made an attachment for my 3d printer to turn it into a pen plotter. And then wrote a bunch of code to turn an image into a stylized CMYK pen drawing. https://youtu.be/Vxd-ndoMD1o

Tesla is probably a new market disruption. If so electric is a bit of a red herring. There is some evidence of this with the trade in data. The analogy is apple taking out Nokia Motorola and Blackberry with a phone that wasn't good by the standards of the day since it was playing a different game.

Here is the paper they published: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1709/1709.05918.pdf

And the press release from last year: http://news.mit.edu/2017/new-3-d-printer-10-times-faster-com...

Having worked at Technicolor a while, they just licenses the brands to 3rd party OEMs. So the hardware is not from the same company.

I totally agree about engaging with the real world and it not happening (directly) through an app. However, in my experience having spent a fair bit of time in the same coffee shop: proximity is easy; repeated unplanned _interactions_, not so much. Maybe there are regulars, but there is nothing about (my) coffee shop that led to regular interaction. Nor is there something to let their guard down. Maybe a coffee shop is a good setting (or maybe another is better), but I think something more is needed to hit these criteria beyond just random luck.

This old story seems relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247488

"three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other"

If anyone is up for an app/company to address these issues, ping me.

It does predate capacitive touchscreen keyboards. However it wasn't made explicitly for full size physical keyboards. They explicitly had soft keyboards in mind. Here is the paper that introduced the phrase set [1] at it refers to this soft keyboard they made previously [2].

[1] http://www.yorku.ca/mack/chi03b.html [2] http://www.yorku.ca/mack/p25-mackenzie.pdf

(similar disclaimer: I've done a bunch of text input work for mobile)

That phrase set was explicitly designed for text entry (typing) experiments. While not optimal, it does allow for more direct comparison to a large body of previous studies using the same phrase set (and similar procedures).

Having said that, keyboard input methods that provide suggestions/corrections at multi-character or word level features probably also benefit from longer words since the recognizer has more signal to work with. Revisiting the assumptions that went into that initial phrase set (character at a time input) in light of modern text input techniques might be a good thing.

Ethnographers tend to be rather hands off (/against) directly changing who they're observing. Contextual Inquiry (http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/contextualinquiry.htm, http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In...) is a fairly light weight method and I think would benefit a lot of startups.

It isn't just that Nokia X is dead. This says they're killing of all of what use to be "Smart devices" - which is/was the feature phone division. So that includes the Asha series, etc.

And here's the same link I submitted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989869

Adding in maps would also be interesting - seeing where these different "similar" places on the planet are.

I like Clay Christensen's model for innovation [1]. He has a top level categorization of sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation.

Sustaining innovations are about making products in existing markets better and are further broken down into continuous innovation and discontinuous or radical innovations. The metrics here are about if the new innovation is improving performance within an existing market and by existing value metrics, and by how much. Continuous innovations are small improvements, radical innovations are large improvements.

Disruptive innovations are also broken down into two categories. There is the low end disruption whereby a product is competing in the same space as existing ones, but comes in from below. These are often cheaper and worse to start with, but then move up market as technology improves. There are many examples here (eg Arm coming in under x86). The other disruptive innovation is the new market innovation. In Christensen's terminology, these products compete against non-competition. There is a need, but no products fullfils that need until the disruption comes along. These products are tricky for several reasons. For one, there is no existing market and therefore traditional market research doesn't work. Instead, the execution plan needs to be focused on learning what the market is and what the customer needs are.

1] The series of books starting with the Innovator's Dilemma are a good read on innovation. The wikipedia article is a pretty good overview as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

Having gone through the adoption process successfully twice, I've thought a bit about what it might mean to create a product that could help here. One challenge is that adoption is very local and distributed. The homestudy and post placement processes don't seem like obvious areas where you could make incremental improvements to the current system.

There could be something in a service to help with adoption profiles. There's a lot of parts to that process that could be facilitated. I also wonder if parts of the education process (eg several of the mandatory parenting, etc. classes) could be put online.

How about roulette? Ed Thorp built a wearable with Claude Shannon (as in Information Theory) in 1961! They were using it solve for where the ball would land on the wheel. http://monet.cs.columbia.edu/courses/mobwear/resources/thorp...

I wouldn't be surprised if something akin to the Remembrance Agent ends up on Glass. For his PhD thesis, Brad generalized the ideas of the Remembrance Agent to the broader notion of JITIR - Just-In-Time Information Retrieval. He built a web sidebar in that work, but that probably isn't the right app either. However the idea of doing a continuous search based on what you're doing would fit it well. Before it was just searching your own stuff, but now they'd hook in more generally to Google's search. Couple that with something Siri like where the speech recognition is feed as input for a proactive search.

I'm still not sure this is a compelling application for a wide audience, but for several of the early everyday users of wearable computers (including myself) it had a lot of appeal.

The name isn't all that obvious, but from what I recall of the original talk by Jake Wobbrock, he intended the recognizer to be very simple and easy to implement [edit: and computationally simple] (as opposed to HMMs or the like). This is alluded to in the pdf of the linked paper: "we present a “$1 recognizer” that is easy, cheap, and usable almost anywhere in about 100 lines of code."

What's old is new again. This is similar set of wearable fashion shows held about a decade ago by Charmed: http://www.jarrellpair.com/wearable-technology-fashion-shows...