tkanarsky

I'd say PlatformIO is a better analogy -- a framework that lets you use virtually whatever HAL you're familiar with (Arduino, Zephyr, freeRTOS, mbed, etc) with whatever hardware and its corresponding toolchains.

At risk of sounding too GenZ: this is cringe

You just described Planet Fitness to a T.

ah yes, the "VC wake words" special

> Bill Ready, Google’s president of commerce and payments

Nominative determinism strikes again!

FPGA is literally as parallel as you can make a computation, the ultimate jaunt towards the space end of the time/space tradeoff. Don't like waiting two cycles for your ALU to finish working on previous data? Put another ALU right next to it.

So yes, you can totally make a parallel program on an FPGA. As long as there isn't a data or control dependency between two statements, they can be implemented to execute simultaneously.

As far as flowchart programming, I'm not sure what advantages that would confer over existing HLS tooling.

You virtually cannot. Short of potting the phone in a slab of epoxy, or welding every seam, helium will find a way to sneak through any rubber gasket, O-ring, etc that seals a phone, even straight from the factory.

Magnetic field strength falls off with inverse square, so it shouldn't be an issue outside of the immediate MRI room. The helium risk to MEMS oscillators is real -- a former employer had an incident involving gaseous helium venting and a dozen bricked iPhones and watches.

Hmm, off the top of my head I think that it takes as much energy to pump water down a 1-foot tube as it would for a 1000-foot tube. It's like rotating a long loop of chain on a pulley, but in three dimensions. One liter of water goes down the tube, one liter of water comes up around the tube. Both sides weigh equal amounts so there's no net force. Of course, overcoming inertia to get the water moving and keeping it moving despite friction might be significant. Ironically, a consequence of the oil industry is that we have powerful pumps that are proven to be economical in moving large amounts of liquids long distances through pipes :)

I used this approach last year to run a Twitter bot that would report when local pharmacies had 'rona vaccine appointments open up. I scraped the API's of CVS, Rite-Aid, Walgreens, and a few other chains this way. Although I didn't go fancy and try to distill the API down to the bare minimum headers, I just called into cURL from Python with that giant command as a string.

It's remarkable how unchanged the community feel has been on HN -- those headlines would not be out of place on today's front page if you change the company names and tech stacks a bit :) Doesn't seem like there's been an eternal September moment in the past decade and a half (like Reddit's push for mobile adoption, for example). Really a testament to the mods' consistency, thanks @dang!

Reading this article feels almost like satire. An encryption product with an in-your-face backdoor, sporting a dystopian name like “Law Enforcement Access Field"? It’s interesting and very fortunate to see how quickly the tide was turned by PGP and other free encryption s/w.

That's freaking awesome. For those unaware, the RP2040 microcontroller has several Programmable IO (PIO) cores, which are essentially standalone state machines that read/write directly from memory to the GPIO pins. Unlike bitbanging the pins with the CPU, you can implement much more timing-sensitive protocols while reducing CPU usage at the same time. There's demos of people implementing VGA out, digital audio, all sorts of interesting protocols.

https://github.com/MattGorko/libu2f-emu can spin up virtual U2F tokens which are indistinguishable (in my experience) from real ones plugged into a USB port

Anecdotal, but I've seen figures like "number 263 in line for representative, estimated wait time 8 hours" in the weeks after I got my lemon Pixel 6 and had to get it RMA'd. Even after I got through to a human, it took tons of effort to escalate away from the song-and-dance "troubleshooting support" to a person who actually had the ability to get a replacement mailed out.

Contrast with Apple, where I've gotten knowledgeable humans on the line within a minute or two, and scheduled a service appointment at a nearby store.

If Google wants its Pixels to be the iPhone of the Android world, then they should provide more than the bottom-of-the-barrel outsourced support they currently offer.