Hacker News Reader

SilentDirgeon Google to Make Security Guards Employees, Rather Than Contractors

Doesn't this reduce their ability for overtime pay in certain situations?

SilentDirgeon “How to Start a Startup” Audio Files

How do they handle the parts where the presenters refuse to read the slides? Also, why do they do that?

SilentDirgeon Code Archeology – Lines of code by age

Perforce does this with the Revision Graph/time-lapse view. Super handy feature for understanding new code and how it evolved (or regressed :-)

SilentDirgeon Sony develops transparent lens eyewear “SmartEyeglass”

Yeah, it's fugly, but in typical Sony fashion, i.e. Exec: "Google Glass is the future. We must own the future. Make a Google Glass Killer". Engineer: "Well, Google has spent years miniaturizing the required tech to make it into a fashion accessory people can accept. It will take us years as well". Exec: "You have 6 months"

Bada bing! We get this beauty.

SilentDirgeon Oculus Rift Development Kit 1

Great to see the acquisition hasn't changed the founders promise to be opensource. Bravo!

Looking at the files it's a pretty well designed piece of hardware but nothing too technical. The magic (as usual) is in the software.

The design is pretty good too. They even included the carrying case, though, it's missing a clip, ha.

SilentDirgeon Failed many times before raising $13M on Kickstarter

Exact opposite for me. Getting fabbed boards where I live takes forever (and is expensive) so I etch my own. Populating an SMD PCB takes forever, but, no interns for me as a small indie so I work in my basement till 3am with tweezers and a hot soldering iron.

Injection molding is actually super cheap in volume -- the expensive part is the metal mold which costs an arm and a leg. Mess up a mold and, bam, your project is no longer profitable (or breaking even, if you were lucky).

3D modeling is actually easy now with packages like Sketchup. If you have the dough the pro's use Solidworks or Inventor (my fav), which abstracts the development process to 2D sketches which can then be pulled, extruded, cut etc... analogous to what you would do with your hands on paper or with clay (or legos or whatever). It's really best to have a vision and use a designer to bring it to life but when you don't have that option it's still possible to get _something_.

You didn't mention it but setting up and running a crowdfunding campaign is time consuming, difficult and crazy stressful. I'm about to launch mine in a few days and am basically not sleeping.

Props to Ryan -- what he has done is NOT easy and he deserves all the success he as achieved so far.