Hacker News Reader

zakalwe2000on Ask HN: How did you find your current job?

My new job was a recruiter cold message on LinkedIn. This was pretty novel as all my previous jobs (~17 years worth) were referrals of some sort.

zakalwe2000on Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

It's not free to design or sell, even if the audio parts used "have the capability". If Apple thought they'd sell more phones, they'd do it.

Back when I was fighting the good fight against Apple, MP3 player vendors kept adding FM (and eventually HD Radio) in the hope that it was what Apple users were missing... The radio industry liked that strategy too.

P.S. Headphone antennas are kind of shit.

zakalwe2000on I defeated a long-broken fridge and became a household hero through 3D printing

Spoiler! Author is a mechanical engineer.

zakalwe2000on Project Ara Lives: Google's Modular Phone

There's a graveyard of phones that thought there was a market for a wider variety of form factors. This is a variation on that theme.

To put it another way, if you were running a medical devices company with limited resources, would you bet on this or bluetooth?

zakalwe2000on Project Ara Lives: Google's Modular Phone

Ugh, this has always been a terrible idea - apparently a vanity project by people who know nothing about how manufacturing works.

Every piece they make modular adds cost - cost of connectors, weight of the frame to support them, cost of support when the connectors fail.

You can go on about "waste" all you want, but the lowest cost, lowest material devices are rated for single-insertion connections along with components both stacked and heavily integrated.

The reason they could not do displays, RAM, etc is that these components are tightly integrated to the SOC selected, and change regularly. This was true when they announced, even more true now.

Truly Google is the new Microsoft if they devote such time to obvious executive vanity projects, untouched by the taint of reality.

zakalwe2000on Unix’s file durability problem

There's worse problems at a lower level - hardware caches on the disk do not really guarantee flushes are honored either. There's a discussion of this here - honoring writes is an enterprise feature... http://serverfault.com/questions/460864/safety-of-write-cach...

zakalwe2000on WikiLeaks reveals the NSA spied on Berlusconi and his closest advisors

Pope discovered to be Catholic. Now if the NSA had spied on Smokey Bear...

zakalwe2000on What happened to Microsoft's Midori operating system project?

that was my impression of it as well, a very senior employee retention scheme.

zakalwe2000on I mine for 100-year-old jeans

very gibsonian profession