windlep

> This isn't really for drones. It's for frying ground-based electronics like cell phones. Drones are the smoke screen to hide that fact.

Or imagine a smaller system integrated on a humvee that can destroy electronics in anything along the path a few dozen meters in front and in a smaller side/side area. That'd end the IED threat from anything other than a purely mechanical IED (not sure if many of those are around anymore, as everything assumes electronics will work nowadays).

At this point, I just assume it will all go back to being as wacky as it was under Bush (very wacky). He threw in plenty of people that refused to acknowledge Climate Change too.

Now, its fascinating how much executive power Obama has used to push through policies that neither the House nor Senate would agree to. And yes, Trump will definitely roll them back.

I still don't understand why the Dem's didn't try and change this whole crappy process when they briefly had it all. None of these positions should be so easy to f-up with a new President. They should require actual knowledge and a proper skill-set for the people in them.

Indeed, and that proposition is not at all what it appears to be at first glance. Voters in California should definitely do some due diligence researching that before voting or they're going to be in for a nasty shock at the outcome.

> ... polish really find Linux or Windows that much better?

It's definitely not better when it comes to polish, it's worse. However, instead of the lickable polish of OSX, you get responsiveness that makes OSX feel laggy in comparison.

Under Windows at least, you still have Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. except I've found they run faster than under OSX. Whether I'm on my PC or my retina Macbook Pro, I usually develop under a Linux VM via VMWare, and VMWare is definitely much more responsive under Windows as well.

Regarding Homebrew, if you didn't want to use a linux vm setup, there's now the linux subsystem on Windows 10, which has worked well for the few things I've tried under it.

But yes, everything looks worse than OSX. I found I haven't cared as much as I originally thought I would, especially with the increased responsiveness and lack of beach-balls (you don't realize how used to beach-balls you are till you stop seeing them).

Fiber the way the US does it is rather lame. Consider that where Google has put in fiber the houses now have:

- Copper telco lines

- Coax cable lines

- Google fiber

There's zero reason for anything other than fiber in an area being updated to it. States/municipalities should solicit bids for a company that wants to maintain the fiber infrastructure, and other companies wishing to provide phone/tv/internet over the fiber can all compete on their service over the one fiber line.

We only have one telco and one cable line because states blessed monopolies for this, they should do the same for fiber, and open access to it for competition from service/content providers. It'll never happen, but I can dream...

> Using firefox? Did you tick "Send analysis data to Mozilla"? If yes, Mozilla has the very same information about your browsing habits and all clicks and actions you performed in Firefox too.

That is blatantly false. The policy page here describes what is sent for each data feature in Firefox:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

Mozilla does not have tracking cookies scattered through-out the web tracking you. Google via Google Ad's and Doubleclick does (as does Facebook via their social features).

Neither the Chrome browser nor Firefox sends "your browsing habits and all clicks and actions you performed" to their respective companies. If you turn on History sync, the clients encrypt all this data before uploading.

Disclaimer: I work at Mozilla.

edit: Chrome can send all history unencrypted to Google if you ask it to, under Privacy Checkup, Web & Web App Activity: "Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services". Supposedly this is to make the search more relevant. This was unchecked for me by default though.

I'll admit I'm not very interested in speech recognition of this nature when it can't disambiguate the speaker. ie. the way Amazon Echo and other voice recognition systems can't tell the difference between a human in the room and the TV. Even when one might be clearly a female voice vs. a male.

None of the voice recognition systems on the market learn my voice distinctly from my wife's or sons, and I don't want their speech triggering things on accident (especially my son's), so I don't use any of them.

I'll be more impressed when I can restrict Amazon Echo or one of these assistants to ignoring any voice that isn't at least rather similar to my own, not merely recognizing the words I'm speaking.

Tech trolling at its finest. Blaming SV is a fun game of late it seems, but this poor example of it ignores the fact that the processed food industry has been doing this for quite a few decades. No techie VC money at play here (Soylent is based in LA, not SV, but facts are not a concern in this article it seems), just the big food processing companies.

Yup.

> The browser will require more memory than the operating system it runs on.

Done! And of course, many apps routinely now take more memory than the OS.

I agree entirely with everything on this list. Thankfully, there is a modern solution!

Buy the PC of your dreams, install Windows 10 on it, then install VMWare Workstation. Put the linux distro of your choice in vmware, enjoy! Everything will just work, consistently, elegantly, and without hassle.

Play your games with Steam in Windows of course, and thanks to Windows handling all the drivers, you can enjoy issue-less plug-and-play with USB and everything else. Merely install the apps that only work in Windows.... in Windows, and keep the rest of the dev-work in the linux VM.

The only caveat I can think of, is that you don't get 2d GPU hardware acceleration, vmware will accelerate 3d, but not 2d for say, compiz. I usually turn off these random 2D type effects so I don't notice that. Virtualbox is an option of course, but it still doesn't feel solid enough to me. At some point Hyper-V will have enough GPU acceleration with vmconnect that Windows 10 Pro + Hyper-V will be plenty (I know it has RemoteX acceleration now, but afaik that's only for Windows Server...).

I've loved this solution so much, I actually copied my VM over to my Retina MacBook Pro so I can use the linux VM for development work on the go. OSX handles ensuring the wifi always works, and the VM sees it as a reliable hardwired connection, no issues.

After 15 years of being a hardcore OSX/Apple user(fanboi), I cannot be more happy with the past 18 months since switching to this configuration. Cheaper than the Apple ecosystem, and waaaay faster hardware.

If 'open source' isn't about having.... I dunno, all your source-code being licensed under an OSS license... then what exactly is it?

I think the word you're having more of an issue with isn't 'open source', but defining what exactly a 'project' is vs. a business. On that latter point, I would agree with you that a project doesn't seem as much of a 'project' when most of the core people are employed to work on it towards specific goals the funders have designated.

> What happened? How, in those early Internet years, did we get the future so wrong?

Sort of reminds me of some scientists concerns after inventing the atom/hydrogen bomb.... oops, what did we just do?

Yet I don't see or hear about any tech ethics groups. You know, a group of people that actually tries to determine whether some tech being considered/built will actually be good for society or not. From what I've read, the Amish have such a thing, ie, it's not that they're strictly anti-tech, but that they have community leaders that evaluate the pros/cons to their society before allowing its introduction.

I found it refreshing that there's movement around an AI group of this nature to try and ensure we don't hose ourselves with AI, but really, a broader tech ethics group should've already been on that as well.

Unfortunately it's much easier to just plow ahead and ignore such things in the hopes of being the next billionaire startup founder. Leave it to someone else to decide whether you're making things in our society/world better or worse.

I have one of those lying around, but the issue afaik is that the Steam Link kind of takes over the PC that is running the games to stream the system. Hooking up the speaker/controls/VGA of my arcade via a long cable directly to my PC, means Windows sees it as another screen with more devices.

Then I just tell VMWare Workstation that the arcade joystick USB should go directly to the arcade VM, and drag the VM window over to the arcade screen. This means I can use my computer directly as normal (I code in a linux VM on it), while the arcade is running independently. It works really well and lets me use a spare 4ghz core to run Hyperspin+MAME faster than my old arcade PC ever did.

Yea, I've had too many issues with imprecise SNES emulation, so I only wanted to use bsnes. I get why people skimp and go for a less precise emu that can handle their hardware, but its too frustrating to me to invest time into a game to be thwarted by emulation failures.

Ah, is that the latest model of the RasPi? It was lagging quite abit on my older Rasberry Pi B model.

I've had an arcade cabinet with a 9-year old computer in it that finally failed the other day. I tried the Rasberry Pi route awhile ago, it does fine on the oldest 80's MAME games, but has issues with most of the 90's era games of which I'm still quite fond. And as others have noted, it's prolly going to suck for NES/SNES emulation.

So when the arcade computer failed, I tried a different route. I realized my main desktop computer (a Core i7-4790k) is plenty powerful to do some arcade gaming on the side. A long VGA/USB/audio cable later, and my arcade is now running directly off a VM from my desktop. This works so much better than dealing with moving games on/off a SD card, and managing more physical things. It's easy to manage the VM, snapshot it, and change the config without even touching the arcade now.

With VT-d, PCI-passthrough, and the ridiculous amount of CPU cores everything comes with that this should be a more normal thing in the future. It'd be lovely to use those new multi-Gbit wireless standards instead of a cable though...

> Of the millions (yes millions) of dollars they've received, little seems to have gone toward Firefox development.

I'm not sure what you believe it costs to employ all the engineers that Mozilla has whom are busy constantly...

- fixing bugs (while trying to ensure each fix doesn't cause new breakage)

- implementing new specs (which are constantly evolving)

- doing R&D on next-generation browser-tech (Rust, Servo)

.. but its not 'little'.

Then there's the fact that merely tossing more people at it doesn't mean things get done faster.

You'll see some large improvements in Firefox as techniques tested in Servo are integrated into Firefox.

Course, the Firefox Platform team is hiring (https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/?team=Engineering), so feel free to apply and get paid to work on Firefox. :)

Disclaimer: I work at Mozilla.

Which proves you didn't already open it, swap in a brick, and reseal it to make it look unopened... how?

> If someone came up with a better search engine, Google would just buy it or hire the principals before they did.

Not really. The people with the better search engine might prefer to be 'the next Google' instead, and if they're not public yet its easy to not be bought. Just say no (even the VC's might prefer this as it could be a bigger later payout). If it was that easy to just buy anyone you wanted, Google would've owned Facebook quite awhile ago.

I was thinking about that as well. Depending on the payload, it might make sense to build duplicates of many satellites for redundancy should SpaceX lose a rocket. Cost-wise that could still come out ahead given how much more ULA costs.

Of course, I doubt it'd come as a surprise to anyone that these payloads are likely insanely expensive as they too have gone through the govt procurement system (which seems to make everything cost 100x what it should cost). At which point it makes sense to avoid losing the payload even at ULA pricing.

I wrote a tool to evaluate memory per connection one layer up (at websocket level), using autobahn. It works in asyncio, so it should work fine with uvloop.

https://github.com/bbangert/ssl-ram-testing/

Cool! For the client test I'm referring to, these would be long-lived clients that stay around and just TCP ping for an echo server, rather than HTTP calls that connect/disconnect.

In my experience, PyPy+twisted is around 5-25x faster CPython/twisted, and smoked asyncio as well. Would be great to see how uvloop compares there, and of course, someday when PyPy supports Python 3.5, there's no reason it couldn't use uvloop via cffi I'd hope.

This is quite interesting, but I don't find req/sec very interesting at all. These should be about matters of concurrency, that is, how much is being done at once, not how many req/sec overall are done (which could almost be explained away purely by the gains in lower latency).

These benchmarks seem to only use 10 clients concurrently, max. That's ridiculously low.

A few questions I'd like to see answered.

How many clients can you connect to each server, and have each one ping once per 5 mins, before the CPU gets overloaded?

How much memory is used per connection?

How does PyPy+Twisted fair in this?

The neighborhood around Kennedy Jr High School and Monta Vista High School. Many houses over the past decade became mini-mansions for awhile, but the recent trend seems to be ignoring basic house maintenance.

I didn't mean to imply there were lots of houses like this, but even two houses kept up poorly on a single street in this area is a relatively new thing.

I'm inclined to believe many are empty investment properties. A documentary about the housing costs showed a Chinese investment tour of Cupertino for such purpose:

https://youtu.be/SBjXUBMkkE8?t=2m35s

The other issue is that the high school I went to there, Monta Vista High School, is extremely well-ranked. As such some investors buy houses, then rent them to a single custodian who boards as many students as possible so they can attend the schools. These custodians don't seem to have a high priority on keeping the house in great shape.

Yup, it can just become 50% empty investment properties, and folks can scrounge for what's left. Some solution is going to be needed to prevent that situation, though maybe with all those empty houses, there'll be less people to make traffic so bad.

I'm sure the fact that there's an increasing trend of empty Chinese investment properties isn't helping. I grew up in Cupertino, and when I visit my parents there, I'm rather shocked at how downhill the neighborhood has gone in parts. It's crazy that these old 70's tract homes go for 1.5 million. Even more insane is that they're bought and then left empty to go downhill. Literally broken windows and paint falling off. I never used to see that.

Part of the problem with building more housing (outside of SF where transit is decent) is that it means even more people. Lack of effective mass transit means those additional people need to drive everywhere, and there's no space for more roads/freeways. So the roads will just get even more clogged.

Cupertino recently had a developer proposal for 4 large high-density housing developments (condos & some apartments), and of course they were to go into areas that already had ridiculous traffic, and there was no way to facilitate even more drivers.

Until the South Bay gets serious about mass transit, merely adding more housing is only going to make the traffic pain worse.

Unfortunately this post won't get many upvotes cause its not negative about an employer (everyone loves dirty drama, the HN upvotes say it all), so I'm quite happy to see someone post about some great work they've done.

Documentation is a long and fairly thankless job, for some reason I don't see bootcamps kicking out technical writers, which is a shame because we need more great technical writing. Thanks for all the hard work making development better for so many!

Absolutely, of course, without a spreadsheet like this, its really damn hard to know what ballpark "get paid what you're worth" even is. At least with numbers like this, a few visualizations accounting for remote/office, and geographic location people will know the appropriate ballpark figures to work towards.

It would be nice if a simple spreadsheet could include minimum PTO/year and some anecdotal average working hours (does everyone live at the office? or not?)