bnewbold

Just downloaded and opened a .pdf from nsa.gov.

Oops.

I'm not sure I agree with the argument that faster line rates creating a speed limit for firewalls. It seems like firewall hardware could parallelize internally at layer 3, sharding by source/destination IP or port, so all packets from a single flow will go through the same processing core, no? This would add a finite latency, but I don't think it would impact throughput.

Am I missing something?

If you are targeting ARM microcontrollers, you may be interested in http://zinc.rs/, which includes only libcore and results in libraries of a few kB (or, hundreds of bytes for just a blinky).

Comes on very strong with the tale of currency replacing barter as a means of exchange, which I thought was very convincingly challenged in David Graeber's book Debt.

I can't agree more that developing and delivering competitive VR will be resource intensive over many years, but Oculus had already raised on the order of $100 million, and i'm certain they could have either raised capital for manufacturing or negotiated directly with an existing contract manufacturer for production (many of whom must surely have been beating a path to their door). Is a large tech company really that much better of a bank/VC than a bank or VC? ("don't answer that question")

You mention that Facebook brings "scaling infrastructure experience to the table". While FB's datacenter and network expertise might be very helpful for rolling out any hosted or networked VR applications, I would argue that shipping a hardware product requires a radically different culture compared to shipping web applications. Oculus will be, at best, be Facebook's first big risky learning experience in meeting contemporary expectations for consumer electronics logistics. Even Apple is still learning how to do this, and they have the benefit of shipping dozens of products with similar scale and expectations. I think if Oculus had done things on their own, or with a less brand name partner (Flextronics?) customers would have been willing to cut them much more slack regarding schedule and minor roll out woes as long as the core technology/experience delivered.

Another major downside from such tight ties to Facebook will be convincing other large institutions/platforms (Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo, Google/Android, Apple, hardware vendors) to cooperate or collaborate in building new services. Oculus might be promised autonomy, but would Palmer still be allowed to unilaterally negotiate with Linden Labs, or IBM, or Apple? Seems unlikely.

EDIT TO ADD: The whole acquisition would make a lot more sense if Oculus had suddenly come under direct legal/patent/IP pressure, which could burn through that $100M a lot faster than, eg, the most significant advances in VR in a generation.

See also, "Warner Bros and Intel Sue Over HDCP Crack Piracy" from December:

http://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-and-intel-sue-over-hdcp-...

"Freedom USA, which also operates under the names AVADirect and AntaresPro, makes several devices which allow consumers to convert HDCP-encrypted digital signals to analog signals. This means that users could potentially record pay-per-view broadcasts, including Hollywood movies."

"Aside from the 'piracy' element brought up in the complaint the devices sold by Freedom USA also have legitimate uses, such as connecting a new set-top box to an older TV or monitor."

What, no IPv6? :(

At columbia.edu via scholar.google.com:

http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac%3A147969 http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/download/fedora_content/...

"The world's free universal parts library" "There are 124 more parts"

A ways to go!

If footprint/symbol files and part metadata will be sourced from users, will that communal resource be made available through an API and/or bulk data releases? Or will it be controlled and enclosed?

The screencast has an old front page which mentions "Like Wikipedia[, we will not charge for access]", so my hopes and expectations are high! Of course Wikipedia is not a for-profit endeavor.

It's unfortunate that TeleGeography, while on the one hand demonstrating beautifully how closely connected many of us have become, seems at the same time to collaborate with BlueCoat, a company that helps censor the content coming down these tubes on a national scale.

This mash-up paid for by... ?

http://www.telegeography.com/products/commsupdate/articles/2...

Formerly known as moxie's wpacracker, now with stripe.com payment processing and an API.

What about Amazon? Seems to approach cash value. Can somebody explain what's happening here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Amazon-Gift-Card-50-Fifty-FREE-SHIPP...

Old link, but the class is very much still alive, here is the course website from last spring (6.945, "Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming"): http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/

And the excellent "Classical Mechanics: A Computational Approach" using the SICM textbook (with SICP as a reference): http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/

Obligatory animated gif: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/henon_anim.gi...

NYC - Octopart

We build tools to help anybody find and source electronic parts and industrial controls components. Octopart is profitable and has half a million monthly users, but we are just beginning to modernize this industry and impact how "stuff" gets designed and made. Our users are engineers, scientists, industrial designers, big companies, little companies, hackers, and students.

Looking most urgently for a front ender, an analytics engineer, and a business person, but if you are excited about what we are doing drop us a line: http://octopart.com/jobs

If you're curious about what these papers are, here is a hack at exposing the metadata in an easily searchable format. It would not be hard to scrape the PDFs to searchable text using unix tools (doesn't come out very readable) and render them as SVG files with inkscape for easy browser viewing:

http://robocracy.org/royal-search/

https://github.com/bnewbold/royal-search

Lots of good old stuff, such as "On the Double Organs of Generation of the Lamprey, the Conger Eel, the Common Eel, the Barnacle, and Earth Worm, Which Impregnate Themselves; Though the Last from Copulating, Appear Mutually to Impregnate One Another"

This is all available elsewhere, i'm just trying to demonstrate how low the barrier to search is with OSS tools; I hope all these papers end up on archive.org with full text search!

I've been having very good results with the Inkscape SVG renderer (inkscape -z input.pdf -l output.svg). Not pixel-perfect, but handles images and vector diagrams pretty well, and text is selectable/searchable. This would be a server-side solution, not client-side.

Really? That exact story is result #4 searching for "thriftdb" (http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=thriftdb) and the only result when searching for stories (http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=thr...)

These results are as of 1pm EST on Saturday, as this very comment thread gets indexed the ordering may change...

There is an API, linked from the bottom of every page: http://www.hnsearch.com/api

For the next two weeks there's even an API contest going on! http://www.hnsearch.com/contest

I've been thinking of doing something and i'm looking for people to work with! Notes here: http://memeschemes.com/code_search/