mafuyu

While the research was unfortunately performed under the CMU name, the SEI was more or less founded by the government to do this type of research and is not related to the rest of the school.

I wrote to the ethics board about it when the story broke, but I doubt anything will be done, as it's more or less a separate institution.

I'm a current ECE student and I could see it.

AlphaLab accelerator and TechShop are in the area, and there are the Google and Uber campuses by CMU.

A lot of the talent right now is getting pulled by the big name west coast companies, but I could see something growing over the next ten years.

(The weather is awfully dreary, though.)

I've recently been coming across some strange message sync issues with using the desktop client on two different computers. It seems like they'll go out of sync, and not all received messages will arrive. Sending works sometimes, but I won't see the "received" checkmark. Re-pairing isn't enough to fix it, I need to delete the Chrome app to clear the history and re-pair. Anyone else coming across this issue?

Chase Freedom has 5% cash back on certain categories that change throughout the year.

I read somewhere that with the technique they're using for the displays, it's very difficult to get a wider fov, and it's continually been a sore point for Hololens.

Despite this, I still think Microsoft is lightyears ahead of the market in the AR space due to the work and research that's gone into Hololens all the way down the stack. They've already made custom silicon to hit their sensor fusion -> display latency requirements and they're making W10 for AR.

A lot of embedded debugging is either using a debugger (if you're lucky) or using various side-channels to infer the state of the machine. For example, you could make a task toggle a pin on the device and hook it up to a scope to figure out if it's being scheduled properly.

If you're interested in electronics, embedded.fm and theamphour.com are both fantastic podcasts.

I think the model itself is valid, it just doesn't work for certain markets right now.

Companies like Amazon and Uber expand their market through convenience and ease-of-use. I make more impulse buys on Amazon with Prime 2-day shipping and take more taxi rides with the convenience of the Uber app.

The problem is it's hard to extract a lot of value without volume and efficiency/integration. Amazon ekes out as much efficiency as possible, being a large online retailer, and Uber was able to 'disrupt' the taxi industry.

It turns out delivery is expensive and even with good process, you can only get so far with a luxury service.

I suspect the on-demand service will slowly die out until it's revived by more efficient transportation (autonomous cars, drone last mile delivery).

It was a dumb pun on the last letter of "emacs" being left off. :P

It's a bit like Vi.

I was thinking along the lines of hard drive spin down/spin up due to power state configurations. The fans would probably be easier, though, provided you could pick up on it.

It would certainly be very difficult. If you could get the bus noise near the 2.4GHz freq range (unlikely), you could use the wifi of the other computer to potentially receive.

Another thing people have experimented with is using the speaker/microphone at above human hearing range. This method usually falls flat because crappy laptop speakers have a hard time going above 20kHz.

One thing I could potentially see working is a laptop with a hard drive generating vibrations with the motor. Then, a smartphone or laptop with an accelerometer could pick up the signal using the coupling through a table.

Yeah, I forgot to mention that this was over a period of two months. I settled to 8.5 hrs, on the dot, but with a shift of sleeping a bit later every day.

Quality of sleep is definitely a big factor, but genetics also govern how much sleep an individual needs. Some people just naturally need less sleep than others. Personally, I've found that if I allow myself to sleep and wake whenever I want, I eventually settle to a stable state of 8.5 hrs sleep/night. However, I typically get less than 8.5 hrs/night on weekdays and sleep in on weekends. After keeping track of my sleep, I found that on average, I was still sleeping 8.5 hrs/night every week, and I would sleep in just enough on weekends to hit my quota.

Chris Gammell (of Contextual Electronics) and Jeri Ellsworth (of Technical Illusions) held a really neat 555 timer contest a few years ago. You can see some of the results here:

http://makezine.com/2011/04/21/555-contest-winners-announced...

http://makezine.com/2012/08/22/555-timer-contest-highlights/

The energy that idle chargers use up is negligible, and even then, it's not as if you can just turn that into computational power. You'd still need to consume (significantly) more energy to mine.

Like many other Amazon products, it's likely to get people into the Amazon ecosystem. You need to install the Amazon app to read prices and they can upsell their Fire devices in-store. Considering how they went for a high-end Barnes and Noble/Apple Store mix vibe, their primary goal is likely not to sell books but to get a foothold into physical retail like Apple.

I would say part of this can be chalked up to a cultural difference. Germans and Japanese are risk-averse (as a generalization) and don't like risky entrepreneurial ventures. You want to take a nice business plan to a bank for debt financing, instead. Think of all the big public German companies like SAP, Bayer, Siemens: they're all in boring, bog-standard industries.

In contrast, other cultures with a greater threshold for risk have more of an appetite for the stock market. This goes hand-in-hand with innovation/startup culture.

I'm interested!

This looks great- just ordered my copy. I'm a huge bunnie fanboy, though. :)

Looks really helpful for bridging the gap people face in going from design to manufacture in electronics.

I think that's true for everyone. I've found that working my way into an existing codebase involves multiple passes, and each time I get a bit more immersed in the code and my assumptions change. It's also good to write documentation in parallel, as you can capture and address all the things that were initially confusing.

(Also, hi Eric!)

The DSPS section is a spot-on characterization of my sleeping patterns:

""

People who suffer from DSPS often resort to their own implausible solutions that include:

-(poorly managed) free running sleep with an inevitable phase delays that ultimately result in sleeping through the day -skipping a night of sleep at a point when the bedtime reaches an outrageously late hour (i.e. usually after the dawn) -stabilization of the sleep pattern with medication (incl. melatonin) and artificial zeitgebers such as an alarm clock or a mom who pulls a sleepy student out from his or her bed for school"

Emergency: Melatonin: If your "protected zone" is stretched to the limit. You may consider an occasional pill of melatonin (e.g. 2 hours before your optimum bedtime). Remember that melatonin will affect your creativity and alertness, and should not be used on a regular basis.

""

I read this as I was preparing to sleep at 10 AM by taking a melatonin pill... I'll give his basic algorithm for fixing DSPS a shot over the holidays.

However, I don't think his characterization of melatonin is warranted. I take melatonin around 15 minutes before I sleep, similar to what gwern does in his article (http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin). This article suggests taking it 2 hours beforehand. It's been working fine for me for a year now, but it's interesting to see that in the natural melatonin production graph further down in the article, it peaks several hours before sleep.

I've been thinking about buying a light therapy box[0] and adding an esp8266 or similar to connect it to my home network. I could position it above my bed and have my phone's alarm trip it on. It would be interesting to see if it gave me a motivation boost throughout the day in addition to helping me wake up.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Verilux-VT20WW1-HappyLight-Intensity-I...

The hobbyist community has been switching over to KiCAD, to the point where I believe KiCAD has a significant majority over Eagle in OSHPark orders. A lot of people switched with the new Eagle licensing model, which they put on hold due to backlash.

This is Olimex's blog, and they design and sell dev boards, so it makes some kind of sense to leave the part that you have full control over to the end, I suppose.

I was under the impression that light boxes worked by causing vitamin D synthesis in the skin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D#Synthesis_in_the_ski...

I remember opening up the binary in IDA and patching out all the phoning home, allowing me to tinker with it as I pleased. I then patched out all the key checking and hooked it back online, only to realize in horror that all the inputs were validated server side. :(

ARM isn't open sourcing anything anytime soon. Take a look at OpenRISC and RISC-V. They're aiming at a fully open source SoC implementation in silicon.

http://openrisc.io/

http://riscv.org/

Of course it's JLENS...

CS:GO is a terribly optimized game (a hack of the L4D2 engine ported from Xbox to PC!), and requires 300 in-game fps in the Source engine for competitive play. 300 fps is the sweet spot for no mouse acceleration and smooth mouse movements, as well as no frame drops on a 144 Hz monitor. CS:GO perf is CPU-limited, and my i7 2600 can only go up to 250 fps on all low settings, so I'm upgrading to a Skylake 6600k.

Blizzard has done a much better job with SC2; one of their goals from the start has been to optimize for low-end computers.

There's a neat site where you can turn your location data into a heatmap: https://theopolis.me/location-history-visualizer/