patrickyeon

Your manager wants to see this! Do you know what happens if you look good? Your manager gets to look good too. It is in their interest for you to be a stellar employee.

> County officers authorized to use stun cuffs are required to go through training and are only allowed to use them “to overcome active resistance” or when “active aggression is an immediate or credible threat to the safety of the deputy(s), the public” or the defendant, Christian wrote in an email.

...

> “If I’m sitting here, I’m no security threat,” Calvert said, according to court records cited in an appeal later filed by Calvert’s lawyer.

> “I’m not talking a security threat,” Skeen replied. “I’m talking about you listening to me.”

> Later, Skeen ordered Calvert to sit down and then, a moment later, to answer a question. When Calvert again failed to stand up to address the judge, an officer activated the device, according to court records.

So. This officer who activated the device. What happened to them? Have they been reprimanded? Criminally charged? Are they still given the ability to shock defendents in Smith County courts?

1-bit recording is in fact a common thing for very noisy signals. You're actually aggressively over-sampling and using correlations over many samples (in time) to get the signal out from under the noise. I've only glanced over it, but this looks like a fun related article, but driving the opposite way (oversampling to get more effective bits) https://thecavepearlproject.org/2017/02/27/enhancing-arduino...

You clearly haven't read the rest of the article. It's not even especially far down that it's mentioned that the accumulated error for the orbital calculations has resulted in errors for satellite positions into hundreds or thousands of meters after a few days.

They made the time fields short because the information would have no value on timescales larger than that.

Real/virtual is maybe not the best dichotomy, but it's explained in the original email. A lunar eclipse as described is the entire Moon in the Earth's shadow. There is no portion of the near side of the moon (the hemisphere that is always facing Earth) that is not experiencing the eclipse. A solar eclipse on Earth only affects a very localized region. Local/global might be a better dichotomy.

Makes sense. Thanks for the correction.

Call the nearest large food bank (as in, the county food bank that serves a city with a population of X00,000+). I suspect they would be happy to share knowledge, there may even be a meta-organization you can join to get help running your organization.

I don't know where you are or how it's done there, but as a single data point the food bank for Alameda County (a fair bit of "East Bay" in the SFBA) would work with an organization like yours by having you come in and pick out piles of food from their warehouse for free or hugely reduced prices.

Because it's a term I'm not familiar with, but you used twice, I looked up "twice exceptional". For anybody else wondering, it "refers to gifted children who have some form of disability."

Because this isn't a magic fantasy world where you're literally turning cash into bigger cash. When someone says "$5 cash becomes $15 worth of food", they mean "I can spend the $5 to get what would cost you $15 to spend". And when it's broken down into "of the $5, $3 goes to paying for food, and $2 goes to paying people", that $2 pays the people who can use the $3 as effectively as the original person could use $15. If you decide to get rid of those people, and just spend the $2 directly on food, you can no longer use it effectively.

If there's a cause you're interested in supporting, you can show up to volunteer or even just a volunteer training. I learnt about how the ACCFB operates at my volunteer training and it was not what I expected.

This is extremely wrong-headed. To begin with, you're stating "downsides" which the original article specifically said "hey, people think this and they're wrong". Downthread you bring up worries like "spending money on advertising", but as I understand it most advertising that charities get, especially non-national level charities, is donated by the companies that own the advertising space (in-kind donations), so they're also not spending money on that.

I've volunteered at the Alameda County Community Food Bank. Do you want to know where your churches and local groups get their food? They come to a central food bank like the ACCFB, where they can load up. The ACCFB does not directly distribute food to people in need, instead trusting smaller groups to know their community's needs better, so they invite those groups to come get food. Staples, fresh produce, baby food and formula at exactly zero dollars all day long, more "premium" products at a heavily subsidized price.

Do you know what the ACCFB spent money on that wasn't food? A gi-fucking-gantic walk in fridge and freezer, so that they don't have to worry about bulk donations/purchases spoiling. And a large warehouse so that they can take in fresh produce from farmers (often stuff that cosmetically won't sell well) and re-sort it in a way that local organizations can use.

You can see what the executives of non-profits make. The Executive Director of the ACCFB was paid $256K in 2017, for overseeing an organization with $64M in revenue. The rest of the individuals on the Form 990 were in the $103K-$150K range. For full-time Chief/Director work IN THE BAY AREA. In case you've been living under a rock, that's not a good salary.

Every "benefit" to donating food is that you get to feel like stopped someone from tricking you and you're smarter than "all of those rubes" who gave cash. Turns out you're actually being the least helpful donor, and now write smug comments bragging about how you're the least helpful donor trying to reduce the helpfulness of other donors.

ACCFB's Form 990 for 2017: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/942...

Heh, from foone themself: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html

Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?" CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT.

The short story is they are quite open about having ADHD, and that's what causes the long twitter rambles, but also what makes it very difficult to assemble it into a blog post. Every once in a while foone's wife will edit a popular thread into a blog post, examples: https://foone.wordpress.com/

If this seems like a particularly good story to you, maybe you'd like to edit it into a draft for a blog post and gift that to foone?

Pretty near all of this stuff is available from North American distributors, Adafruit/Sparkfun for more hobbyist-minded stuff, Digikey/Mouser/Newark for industry. Adafruit takes bitcoin if you're that paranoid.

You're going to have a hard time getting along in the current world, especially in electronics, if anything Chinese sets you on edge though. I'm trying to be gentle, and I know you didn't ask for advice, but consider some counseling if you're "freaked out and feel tense when [you] hear Chinese people talking in Mandarin". Sounds like you're dealing with some history that you could afford to talk to somebody about.

I guess that makes sense, and it's not a particularly new phenomenon. The MOS 6507 (used in the Atari 2600) was mostly the same silicon as the 6502 (as used in Apple II and many other places), but cheaper because it was in a smaller package.

"Microcontroller" refers to everything on the chip (usually, we would talk about it having a "core" roughly akin to memory + ALU + such, and "peripherals" which are on-chip dedicated hardware that migh be eg. I2C or USB communications, timers, ADCs, etc). What you're linking to we would call a "development board" (dev board), "demo board", "eval(uation) kit".

I don't consider the title misleading, as the article is aimed at the people who are designing their own (hobbyist probably, but not exclusively) boards, and will be integrating the chip, not a dev board, into their project.

They are, the car is pushing "forward and to the outside" of turns. For some chuckles, here's Top Gear demonstrating the fact (over and over) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh56geU0X8

As a sibling comment mentions, the two-front, one-back configuration is out there in sport-leisure type vehicles. I think it appeals to people who want motorcycle-ish sportiness but maybe are turned off by the appearance of complete exposure or the possibility of dropping the bike.

Modern three-wheelers I'm aware of, on roughly the "car-ish <----> bike-ish" spectrum are the Campagna T-REX, the Polaris Slingshot, Can-Am Spyder, Piaggio MP3, and the Yamaha Niken. The first two are pretty "sporty car" vehicles, the latter two "complicated motorbikes", and the Spyder maybe a 40-60 mix, IMO.

I just went to https://web.archive.org/web/news.ycombinator.com (no date in the url) and it sent me to the most recent snapshot.

Because I wasn't sure which end of the bell curve this was referring to, "10th to 25th percentile" in this article means students significantly below the median, not above it.

The point wasn't that they can't be massive companies; the point was that they are hard to scale. What works to get to one audience, or to build up to one size, doesn't mean you can throw money at it and "just" grow bigger. In fact, you're saying that when you say it's the wrong team to turn HQ into the next big media play.

Hey friend, don't take it personally. A layoff indicates a failure (of planning, of budgeting, or whatever) at a much higher level of the organization than you

Your position may have been opened before the layoff decision was made, so they decided to leave it open so as not to raise suspicions (managers will rightfully get upset if headcount is taken away from them with no explanation). They might've know the number of people they needed to cull in January, but not decided where it would happen.

There's a lot of work in Seattle. If you're cunning maybe you can get a second hiring bonus in Q1 2019.

- Because they didn't read that part so closely.

- Because they read it closely but didn't interpret it correctly.

- Because they brought it up and their counterpart said "don't worry, that's boilerplate and we've never actually used that clause".

- Because the alternative was signing a contract that had no relocation/hiring bonus.

- Because they needed a job, and that's what was there.

- Because they really really needed a job to keep health insurance or their visa, and they had no leverage.

- Because they had leverage, but were too inexperienced in negotiations to realize it.

- Because they had leverage, but were not comfortable using it, and were taken advantage of.

There's lots of reasons, of varying quality, that someone may do something that seems ridiculous to you. Why are you implying that the (hypothetical) losing party here is the one who's done something wrong?

The account posting it belongs to an employee of kubos. Usually that would be tolerated around here, if it's on-topic and they were to add something akin to "full disclosure: I work for this company". You could debate if it's relevent enough to the article, but either way it'll seem way too close to spam with just that one-liner.

Oh absolutely you're correct here.

> In analog computing, complexity resides in network topology, not in code. Information is processed as continuous functions of values, such as voltage and relative pulse frequency, rather than by logical operations on discrete strings of bits.

...

> Individually deterministic finite-state processors, running finite codes, are forming large-scale, nondeterministic, non-finite-state metazoan organisms running wild in the real world. The resulting hybrid analog/digital systems treat streams of bits collectively, the way the flow of electrons is treated in a vacuum tube, rather than individually, as bits are treated by the discrete-state devices generating the flow. Bits are the new electrons. Analog is back, and its nature is to assume control.

> Say, for example, you build a system to map highway traffic in real time simply by giving cars access to the map in exchange for reporting their own speed and location at the time. The result is a fully decentralized control system. Nowhere is there any controlling model of the system except the system itself.

...

> Even in the age of all things digital, this cannot be defined in any strictly logical sense, because meaning, among humans, isn’t fundamentally logical. The best you can do, once you have collected all possible answers, is to invite well-defined questions and compile a pulse-frequency weighted map of how everything connects. Before you know it, your system will not only be observing and mapping the meaning of things, it will start constructing meaning as well. In time, it will control meaning, in the same way the traffic map starts to control the flow of traffic even though no one seems to be in control.

In these passages, "The Computer" that's running is the network, a meta-computer, made up of the individual "computing elements" if you will that are the physical pieces of hardware that most anyone would point to and call "a computer". And as you've recognized, that's Dyson's point: No matter what those little elements are made of, the overall picture is analog. If we want to understand how "Algorithms" are influencing the world, we can't think of them as "discrete computing algorithms". And finally, the emergent behaviour out of this can lead to large-scale control effected on our society without being designed in, and even if nobody is thinking to effect control.

That was really enjoyable, and I expect my inspection/soldering microscope would be up to this task if I had a roof to search and a few days to spare.

Here's the book shown if anybody else is looking for it: https://www.amazon.com/Search-Stardust-Micrometeorites-Terre...

I have a few convenience scripts that access the Gmail API for my own inbox, and only my own account. Does anybody know if there is some kind of "under development" flag I can set so that I don't have to undergo this review? Am I going to need to convert them to directly using IMAP or something similar?

I'm not horribly against this policy, email is pretty central to a lot of peoples' world, and I suspect there's lots of really really scummy actors out there. In an ideal world I'd be able to say "hey this is my email and I personally wrote the code accessing it, so let it do what it wants".

To expand on a sibling comment, the "this actually maker her more confident..." logic goes roughly like this:

- Jesse and Kaia had considerable difficulty manufacturing and shipping the products this update is about (a keyboard with parts from multiple factories, and additional accessories for it)

- They managed to do it anyway, with a lot of effort on their part.

- It turns out there was actually a person working against them, and not all of the problems they met occured "naturally".

- Without such an antagonist in the future, it should be easier to pull off the same result.

As I understand it, they were talking to someone they believed to be a representative of the factory the whole time. When the story is laid out, after the fact, it's easy to see that someone is being scammed. But the reason scams work is that it's not so easy to see it from the inside. I wonder if you would expect the same, that the owner of an American business personally contact you and cut their own account manager out of the loop at the first problem, if the factory weren't Chinese. Because that's not how it works, there are account managers and explicit points of contact because there's roughly always issues to be ironed out.

I backed this keyboard (received mine months ago!) and have met Jesse and Kaia: they're good people trying to run an honest business. I'm glad I got to back this hardware project on Kickstarter, I didn't "pre-order" anything but rather took a risk on a product and on people who wouldn't have had a chance otherwise.

That's still misleading, at best, for CenturyLink to claim that the law "requires them" to do it this way. There are easier methods to provide the notice (email or with a bill), and there's nothing that could even be contsrued as encouraging them to do this DNS hijacking in the text you provided.

> First of all, could you give some concrete examples of the kinds of data people using this would be handling?

Planet operates imagery satellites, and as far as I know that's the bulk of commercial data _produced_ in orbit that needs to be downlinked. Other commercial services that could include radar data (ICEYE, Capella), ship/plane monitoring (Spire, Iridium NEXT), or high-latency low-bandwidth data (think devices out in the field, on vehicles, with relatively light telemetry and/or control needs). Telecom is usually "bent pipe" (think dumb repeaters) and not any kind of store and forward setup that would use this.

In the future, I could see some broadening of the field with more tech demo/development that needs dedicated hardware, and the possibility of commercial experiments run in an automated orbiting lab downlinking data.

Of course, all of those also need what's called TT&C (Telemetry, Tracking, and Control) links, which I've nearly always seen on a separate physical radio. That tends to be a less demanding link, and more likely to be able to make use of something like this IMO.

> Could you give some ballpark numbers and breakdown of the costs involved?

Unfortunately, I very much cannot do more than point at what's already public; that's one thing Planet is very tight-lipped about. The idea that one spends about as much on launch as on the hardware they launch seems about right, you can go see what Rocketlab[1] and SpaceX[2] quote as prices. I'm sure you can imagine there's still a lot of negotiations once you're talking about big stickers.

Someone's already mentioned SatNOGS[3] further down in the comments. They seem neat although I haven't looked too much into them yet. Schools are spinning up a surprising number of satellite projects, and amateurs are already developing hardware, running tests, and practicing with radioing the hardware that's already up there. I'm sure it's not far from some pitching together on the group buy of a very small amount of launch space.

> Is there some secret cabal of millionaires and billionaires that are really into space?

Yes, but they're not so secret. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, off the top of my head. DFJ and Data Collective are VCs that have been fairly interested, I'm sure there are more looking to get a piece now.

[1] http://www.rocketlabusa.com/book-my-launch/ [2] https://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities [3] https://satnogs.org/

Oh, hey Newman, we chatted a couple times while you were at Planet. Sure, the needs between early testing and production are different, but I still argue that this does neither. When we were doing early work on the satellites and ground segments, being able to get right into the belly of every part of the system was super useful, as we dealt with different things acting up, weird workarounds, unsure technology directions... This is a capability you get by being involved at all levels of a transparent tech stack and having some good generalists on hand to get it all going.

Of course, I'm biased; I say this as a generalist who has done work inside the equipment room at the base of dishes, hooking up my own hardware and managing live passes, as well as debugging via interactive sessions with satellites.