jonmrodriguez

I love the story, and am currently waiting for the next installment.

One very tiny nitpick is about the title; the story is (at least currently) intended for web-based distribution, and in Chrome (Mac), Chrome (Windows), and Firefox (Mac), the title when rendered in the tab bar is truncated to "Harry Potter and the Meth", which frankly I'm embarrassed to have on my screen. A simple change such as using "&" instead of "and" would fix this.

In today's world, it's valuable / necessary to teach a 2nd style of soldering as well: using a heat gun and solder paste to manually reflow surface-mount components. It's just as easy as using a soldering iron, and for many cases much easier! And it's the only way to solder modern chips.

Also I agree with JamesArgo, always use lead-free solder.

WTF. Blinding lasers aren't even allowed in combat during war, they're considered inhumane and banned under international law.

Yeah, holy crap, not fracking specifically but it would be terrible to have a Deepwater Horizon kind of incident, and cause a water flood!

That is a brilliant idea to use a hot mirror and IR camera like that!

This is probably today's most accurate technique to use for VR eye tracking, right? And it looks super cheap for any company or project to produce this assembly in-house.

@fiatmoney's comment seems like very good advice. Here's a link since it's very far below the fold:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849734

Concrete sounds too expensive anyways, just cap it with a big flame-proof tarp. Wouldn't cost more than $10k or $20k I'd imagine.

In regards to your second paragraph, I think you would love starting a hardware startup. :) That's what I did. Although I did study CS in school, in terms of electrical engineering I'm almost entirely self-taught, learning by "implementing and intuitive understanding" as you put it. It works really well actually, my team and I have been able to pull off some pretty incredible feats of engineering, working this way.

I'm guessing that the reason this was downvoted was that I communicated poorly. Here is a better wording of what I was trying to say:

In the Navy you sink a ship from far away. It's more abstract; you don't see the enemy up close.

In the Army you fight battles face to face with the enemy, and it must be correspondingly more horrible.

So I would guess that Navy people (like my grandpa) had a generally more positive memory of the war than Army people.

I would highly encourage you to record another interview!

Most likely there was a huge difference in that regard in navy vs army...

There is more! A full hour! :-D At some point I may post the rest, I just got the recordings back from a data recovery shop; they were on a hard drive that crashed 4 years ago with no backup... Talk about lucky

The hissing is just the noise from a cassette tape recorder, I recorded this 7 years ago before I had a smartphone. My grandpa was healthy right up to the bitter end!

My grandpa, Richard Williams, lived next door to me when I was a kid, and he helped raise me like a parent. He taught me carpentry, plumbing, and electricity, and through countless days together in his workshop he was the one who got me excited about hardware engineering.

I hope to live as he did: to travel every part of the world; to meet and befriend people of all cultures; to be easygoing, and full of childlike wonder; to be a friend even to former enemies; to be driven and hardworking to the point of exhaustion; to cheat death repeatedly; and to make the absolute most of our incredible time on this wonderful world.

:)

On the other side of the coin, I think people should be allowed to opt-in to such an experiment if they are fully informed and not being financially coerced. E.g., if someone's body is dying and they want their brain to live a little longer, and they need several extra days to finish saying goodbye to their loved ones. But there would need to be a ton of anesthesia and other calming drugs given both during and the entire time after surgery. I don't think that experiments like this should be off the table if needed for progress as a civilization, but I think we can't force very lucid animals into these experiments and not give them anesthesia. The experiment itself isn't necessarily good or bad, but forcing a lucid animal into this even if it expresses fear or wants to flee is wrong.

If you connected through a silicon interposer you could use an FPGA or something similar on the silicon to rearrange and possibly even transcode the signals as needed.

Some sort of precise robot similar to a wire-bonding machine could make bonds between nerve ends and pads on the silicon. And then maybe fill the whole area with something solid like epoxy so the bonds don't move or loosen?

Yeah, and "by all measures, normal" was also bullshit, the monkey was paralyzed from the neck down with no spinal connection!

I can't believe we have so little regard for the rights of species very nearly as intelligent and probably equally aware as us. It would be extreme torture to go through a beheading and reattachment with probably little or no anesthesia, and then be forced to live for 8 days in a fucked-up painful & dying state, and no way to escape or even move!

2 can be fixed with better optics. 5 will be solved when there's a killer app.

> Is this an artifact of the camera scanning line-by-line relatively slowly?

Yes!

Forgive my beginner question:

Since a reformat was done to the affected machines, does this mean that researchers' datasets, drafts of papers, and other IP were lost? Or were researchers' machines not affected?

> What. A. Fucking. Bitch.

Although I agree with your general assessment of Campbell, I think you should change your wording here.

It's not right (IMHO) to use gendered insults. That sounds sexist, I think. Much better to just say "What. A. Fucking. Asshole." and leave gender out of it.

Could they land on a modified cargo ship? That way they could also use the ship to ship it back to the port of origin.

> When you move your head there is a delay before the image on the screen updates; make this small enough and you won't notice

Hence why hardware does matter

That "force-fight voter" concept is pretty cool.

By the way, if you hate the US's horrible tax forms, you should boycott the company Intuit (makers of Mint.com, QuickBooks, TurboTax, and more).

Intuit spends a huge amount of money every year lobbying to make sure that tax forms are as complicated as possible: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-mill...

So evil!!!

On latest Chrome in Win 7, I also see all boxes. Interestingly, the page title of the comment thread displays correctly though.

If you use a temperature hot enough for reflow (200C or more, according to andyjohnson0), is there any risk of heavy components on the bottom side falling off?

How does this work? Is the idea that there's a loose chip, and you're reflowing the solder to re-attach it?

Relatedly, one of my friends successfully revived a bricked playstation by heating up the motherboard with a heat gun.

> If she didn't want to be associated with the film, she didn't have to act in it. The problem is she

What are you talking about? Youssef (the guy who made the film) tricked her (Garcia) into thinking she was acting for a completely different film and role. That should be illegal...

Guys. Read the context of Ryan's tweet. He's replying to a tweet in which someone threatened him: https://twitter.com/Tiraspol/status/438872266596569088

Ryan is saying he will defend himself. Self-defense is both legal and IMHO honorable.

Yep, that's the video I submitted.

Well, at least now 1 person got to watch it