wonko1

This popped up yesterday, I guess we really do have short memories... here's what I said then:

Feels like we'd only just forgot about Posterous. At least Posthaven is already there to accept the fallout? Nice to see ten times as much money was raised this time though. Such a shame though, would be nice if there was a better way of extracting value from these viable but non-unicorns.

How about:

Despair Driven Development - It's clear the project/company is going to fail anyway, so hack on anything you want, it doesn't really matter.

Prior to the NHS 111 service that this article mentions they offered a helpline called NHS Direct. This was staffed by trained medical staff. It was excellent. They were able to assess issues and escalate them as appropriate.

So, if you had a non-emergency issue (I.e the person isn't dying right now, but appears to be critically ill) you could call the number and get real advice.

With 111 you are put on the line with in-trained call center staff who walk you through there a set of questions programmed into their knowledge system, they don't understand the questions, they can't help in any way.

Answer the questions "right" you get escalated to an on call doctor who rings you back after about 5 hours in my experience.

This is not good. In the situations I've needed it, I've found it extremely distressing.

I expect this system to give users access to the same system the call center staff are using, and to be similarly unhelpful.

Yes and to be honest I wouldn't go so far as to call a lot of these "Concrete" tasks.

But it is an interesting and throught provoking list. And makes me consider more quantitive metrics for qualatitive things like how good a piece of music is.

I think it's nice to see order stuff that people might not be aware of on HN from time to time.

I'd not heard of it, and it looks great. Wonder how feasible a iOS would be? (Currently supports Windows and Mac so at least somewhat portable).

I hope AM doesn't end up going the same way too. It would be sad if it wasn't possible to throw a radio together using a few discrete components.

It seems like a neat idea but their use case is:

"interactive refrigerators and smart kiosks to security cameras and IoT gateways."

I can't see a strong advantage for Intel here. I don't think there's anyway a modular solution can compete with an integrated design using low cost ARM SOCs (typically <= 1USD for something capable of running Linux in China).

I was kind of hoping this would be targeted at high density server applications, which could be interesting but doesn't seem to be the case.

Reminds me of recent results using 40Hz blinking LEDs to treat Alzheimer's:

http://news.mit.edu/2016/visual-stimulation-treatment-alzhei...

I often fall into the trap of thinking that light at normally encountered levels has essentially no effect. That's obviously not the case though.

Oh neat! I've always wanted this.

When I last tried hacking my Moto360 it was possible to get Debian running in a chroot reasonability easily.

The trouble came mostly with video access. The userland graphics libs are all compiled against BIONIC rather than glibc. And they were at the time only available in compiled form. That meant it wasn't really possible to have a clean glibc system.

I guess either something has changed, or they're using a hack, incorporating BIONIC, which is what many people have done on other mobile platforms.

Very neat though, I'm going to have to try this out!

50USD for what I'd guess is about 1USD of components.

Not that this isn't justifiable... just the way it goes when most of the cash goes into development perhaps.

That appears to be the case on RedStar OS. But on Woolim you can only few government signed or self-signed content, nothing else. That was my understanding from the talk.

Feels like we'd only just forgot about Posterous. At least Posthaven is already there to accept the fallout?

Nice to see ten times as much money was raised this time though.

Such a shame though, would be nice if there was a better way of extracting value from these viable but non-unicorns.

I feel a bit sad to read this.

The CCC is a super-cheap conference. It costs 100Euro (about 100USD currently?) to attend a 4 day conference.

The venue is massive, and roughly 13,000 people attend. There are often 3 or 4 talks going on at the same time. The talks are among the most technically interesting available anywhere.

In top of that, they have areas where people can hack on group projects, and the venue is open 24hours during the conference (some people even crash there over night).

This is all run on a largely volunteer basis. And in my view to a very professional standard.

Someone screwing up and delaying one talk seems pretty insignificant in light of the amazing work they do.

I'd imagine it's because little effort is put into optimizing games for Linux.

Overall, I'd guess the Gabe (having worked at Microsoft) is pretty comfortable with that platform, but likes having Linux their as a hedge (with potential to open up new markets too).

Reminds me of Lenovo's dual display laptop, and its truly awful advert:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MhGkxkzmPbQ

I'm constantly impressed by the effort the DPRK is putting into securing their devices.

I've just skimmed it, but:

The talk describes what is really an extreme form of DRM, the tablet can only open media created and signed by the government or media created and self-signed on the tablet.

Users can't exchange files, if they try the signature check fails.

It's very similar to what they presented last year on RedStar OS, but this seems to be taking it to even greater extremes.

In RedStar OS you could transfer files, but they'd get watermarked. In someways that's even scarier, because they can log ever user who touched the file.

Really very interesting, it will be fascinating to see how this progresses (as well as terrifying).

I think it's partly that if you're not looking for speed improvements then C, as a language, begins to look less attractive.

There are certainly safer alternatives, but not faster ones.

I'd probably agree though, in most cases users don't need the fastest builds (most OS tools). It would be interesting actually to be able to enabled optimized versions of functions as a runtime flag. But I've never seen that done.

The 6502 is actually still in production. However...

Modern assembly x86, or even modern ARM assembly, is significantly more complicated than 6502 assembly.

Starting with the 6502 will let you write working code more quickly and introduce you to the core concepts of assembly language programming.

More than this, even if you never write assembly, being aware of what a CPU instruction set looks like helps you grasp core concepts in C/C++.

If you're only ever going to write high level code (e.g. JavaScript) this probably isn't helpful. But as an aid to understanding how computers work, and what they are capable of, it can be really useful.

Reminds me of Toshiba, and their project to repurpose semiconductor facilities to grow vegetables:

http://www.cleanroomtechnology.com/news/article_page/Toshiba...

Based on my experience of Google interviews, they seem like one of the companies least likely to discriminate based on age.

Their interviews tend to be very tech/algorithm focused. To the point where they disregard almost everything else.

I would have thought, fast and loose early stage startups would be far more likely to discriminate.

It's interesting to note that the 6502 is still in production in 40pin DIP and surface mount variants.

No doubt, a number of old stable designs still rely on it (I'd guess medical/scientific equipment).

But the problem is that everyone really wants their builds to run with -O3 (which should, and is, -Ogoforit).

It's really common for bugs to only appear when compiling with optimization.

Reasonably, when those bugs appear, people go fix them.

My guess is in LLVM these optimization are turned off for debug builds. But who wants to be running debug builds all the time?