davidb_

Or for the employee that gets a promotion to manager, and then finds out how much their former coworkers earned.

Bluespec is a language that's getting attention from academia and industry: http://www.bluespec.com/

The page you linked seems to do a reasonable job of answering that:

"Using on your phone’s built-in GPS, Wi-Fi, and gyroscope to determine distances and the orientation of walls, RoomScan can reliably estimate measurements to within about half a foot, which should be adequate if all you need is a rough floor plan. If, you need more precise measurements, you can opt for the $5 Pro version, which allows you to specify exact distances, and will automatically correct the entire room if you adjust a couple dimensions."

Combining GPS, wifi-positioning, and the gyroscope should be fairly accurate for a floor plan. It's a very clever idea.

latexmk + your document viewer of choice (evince for me) will rebuild your document every time you save. Evince will automatically reload the new document. I use it with vim.

I never got them myself either, but would play with it at my cousin's house.

However, I did get a set of Robotix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotix_(toys)

Looking at it now, I knew nothing of the comic book/TV show connection. I saw them at some children's science museum (maybe in Chicago?) and spent the better part of a day building cars and simple robots.

I remember discovering a similar (maybe the same) bug in my typing classes. I was a fairly good typist, so I would finish the assignment as quickly as I could and then play games on the computer. The teacher wasn't very happy with this and wanted me to continue typing. So, in frustration and boredom, I just typed a bunch of spaces and was quite surprised when it accepted it as correct. I told a few of my friends about this and it quickly spread. The teacher became suspicious of the scores, and I got blamed for discovering the flaw. The teacher then decided she had to watch me complete every one of the typing excercises to make sure I wasn't cheating. Luckily for me, after a few weeks of that she let me go back to completing the assignments quickly and playing games. I still wish my school would have had a more knowledgeable computer teacher to push me to do programming excercises or something more productive than wasting that time playing games.

I think your audience matters as well. Personally, I've noticed if I'm at a party with people I don't know too well (and for some reason discussing personal goals), that interaction has little bearing on my motivation. But, if I'm discussing my goals with people I admire, I am more motivated to complete them in order to maintain my reputation.

> The cost to add the transistors to put an ARM CPU in silicon is < the cost of the metals in the USB and HDMI connector you use to talk to it.

This statement amazes me. It may be true, but it is very counterintuitive to my experience.

A micro USB connector is about $0.35/unit (for quantites of 1500). An HDMI connector is about $0.50/unit (similar quantites). These prices are from Digikey. So, in larger quantites from larger distributors, you could certainly get cheaper prices. The cheapest ARM processor (cortex M0) is about $0.78/unit on Digikey. I understand your point is about licensing the ARM design and integrating it into your silicon, but most low cost devices I've seen have just been PCBs that integrate these off the shelf components. I would have to imagine the cost of hiring engineers to do the VLSI design/integration, the cost of licensing the ARM CPU, and then the cost of fabricating/testing your silicon would have to exceed integration on a PCB. So, I would then assume that the processor, while certainly cheap, is still a very substantial portion of the cost of the device. But, I have no data on the cost of ARM licenses to back that up. You're definitely right in asserting the trend is cheaper and cheaper processors, but I don't think we've arrived at the "processors are so cheap they're basically free" world quite yet.

Stuffing the iphone power supply into the lightbulb is interesting. I'm sure if you took the time you could make/find a smaller switching power supply to stuff in there, but using a well-designed, readily available power supply in this kind of project is resourceful. I wouldn't have thought of it.

Looking around my smallish hometown area, I'm wondering if social workers and/or police make use of tools like this. I'm not advocating either way, but there's lots of young people essentially publicly confessing to crimes (pictures of them vandalizing, screenshots of text messages about planning to steal clothes from the mall, and plenty of teenage angst). I feel a bit creepy for looking at their pictures, but also shocked they're so revealing to the public. How clear does instagram make it that your photos are public? Is it ignorance or apathy on the part of the teens?

So, you got a lot of attention, but the part of the story that is missing is whether or not any of it actually materialized into a job that you wanted (or VC funding or whatever else you were looking for).

Even if it didn't, you definitely seem to have made some good connections, so hopefully it works out for you. Good luck.

I feel like the majority of his "areas of impact" that living overseas has had on him could have just as easily happened if he had stayed in America, but moved to a city with some more diversity. It's more about growing up and making friends with people that think differently than you than just transplanting yourself.

> We already hit a wall with frequency

This is true, but the way you wrote it ignores the fundamental problem - it's not we can't make transistors switch any quicker, it's that doing so causes such an increase in temperature that we risk damaging the device. That's why you can read about overclockers using things like liquid nitrogen to run chips at 8 GHz.

Cooling mechanisms like microchannel cold plates and, as we continue with 3D-ICs, interlayer cooling, can allow for higher frequencies.