mchahn

A long time ago (late 70's) a lab I worked next to had an emergency shower over each worker and there were straps on their wrists. If they jerked their arm back the shower would go off.

I had a friend that would fix bad PCBs that had a short in a middle layer by hooking up a car battery and burning up the short. It actually worked.

> cheap, slow boards from China

I've bought about a dozen chinese prototype PCBs for $0.20 a board and experienced 6 days from order to arrival at my door (using $19 shipping). These are tested boards with 6 mil features up to 100x100 mm. And I've done the board designs using their free online editor. This has been mind-blowing.

Check out easyeda.com. (I'm not connected to the company, yada, yada, yada).

> Software usually has a technical reason for not running on a platform it's not targeted for.

Not true. Many years ago Atari patented a little cartridge flap just so no one else could make a cartridge that could be inserted into their platform. There are many other examples.

I couldn't use this because I only work on a laptop on a couch. I haven't sat at a desk in years. (And yes I also exercise to stay alive).

I still use a RSS reader but the number of my feeds has gone down from a dozen to three. When they quit sending you the feed you are screwed.

> We introduce a malware

How do you get malware onto one of these things? I guess social-hacking could be used but if you have that then no technical solution is needed.

Ironically, the evil businessman Bill Gates was always a nice guy. I had several business meetings with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and they were on the opposite ends of the spectrum. I was on the same dais with Jobs at a conference and had a personal dinner with Bill in Tokyo. Steve was the biggest ahole on the planet while Bill was very personable.

So I am convinced that Bill's current good deeds are reflections of his inherent personality and not related to his business persona.

P.S. Sorry about the name-dropping.

> I just groan. It's going to be painful for sure.

I get amazon packages every day or two for my startup. I don't ever remember any pain.

> The vans in my area are unbranded

Most of my deliveries have been in cars uber-like.

> "Soft" expenses such as uniforms

They do wear an unlabeled orange vest here. Maybe that is just for safety when crossing roads but it lets me know who they are.

I didn't have the time to watch the video but I am acutely aware of the difference between the 1970 unix and today's. My school was down the road from Bell Labs and we had a PDP-11 running unix in a lab in 1970.

Unrelated: We had many different PDP's and the old PDP-8 still brings back fond memories. It was the first real computer under $10k and I dreamed that some day I'd be rich enough to own my very own computer, even though I didn't know what I would use it for.

Ditto. I was intrigued and eagerly reading and then looked for the "more" button.

This is impressive enough that it might turn into a real language instead of a hobby language. I think improving the speed is the top concern. Everything else seems to be already in place.

> accelerating quickly uses up more energy than accelerating slowly

Can you explain this to me? I know gas engines have this attribute but I assumed electric motors didn't.

I was hoping this would be about how piracy was detected, but it was mostly what happened when it was detected.

That is one of my favorite Yogi Berra sayings.

> the screen isn’t on with static elements for 8 hours

I have two old cellphones mounted on the wall in my house that show time, weather, control the thermostat, etc. Most of the display is static. After a couple of years the burn-in is dramatic. I was surprised as I thought only phosphors burned.

GitHub's Atom editor recently added git operations. I use Atom but haven't had the time to try the git wrapping. Has anyone else used it?

> Gold, on the other hand, is just valuable because it is expensive to produce and has a long history of being valuable. ...

Bitcoins are expensive to produce and if it hangs around very long it will have a long history also. So in the long run bitcoin could be a viable alternative to gold.

Maybe unrelated, but one of my favorite sayings is "moderation in all things, including moderation".

O(n²) power drop off only applies to a spherical emission. Focused power drops of much more slowly.

How could a 10% increase in traffic be a problem?

2 things:

Sailors could see the top of ships before the whole ship when using a decent telescope.

I saw the curvature of the earth when I flew to Paris in a Concorde many years ago.

> Two words: washing labels.

Great Idea. However, I had to write software one time that had all the possible washing symbols as input. There were 30 or 40 possible symbols. No human could possibly know all of them.

I've broken several motherboards and many cables over the years. It drives me crazy. The USB-C is the worst. I'm on my third cable now. At least I finally figured out to make sure I get USB-C chargers with removable cables. Now I only have to replace the cable, which I've done twice in the last month.

The Dell XPS 13, which I'm getting in a week or so, has both a proprietary power jack and supports USB-C charging. I'm very happy that I won't be breaking many more USB-C cables.

> The fact that identical twins look similar suggests that most of the variation in facial identity is going to be driven by a heritable element.

I don't see how you get to that conclusion. If a set of twins inherited nothing from their parents they could still be identical. The DNA could be generated randomly and then duplicated.

This is just a logic argument as clearly everyone inherits many things from parents.

When there are a lot fewer cars, congestion will go down. Cars will be shared. Sort of a Uber without drivers. Why own your own car?

"Once perfected, the berserk Super Ball ... The ball became so popular that football's biggest game, the Super Bowl, was a pun on it".

Color me skeptical.

I assume the video frames are each from a different reaction, or many many reactions. Then they are combined to create a model of a single reaction.

What do you mean by "recreate types in tests"? Checking for the right results doesn't require any type-checking. If the result is right the type is right.