wonko1

Can anyone attend these lectures? It's always been a dream to attend Knuth's Christmas lecture.

Of the 2 employers I've had who self-hosted, they both did this. I've also done this when self hosting, it's super easy.

I guess there are probably no surveys of this though...

I really enjoyed this, it reminded me of early experimental sites like what hell dot com used to be...

That's really interesting. I've been considering moving back to my own mail server from gmail for a long time but have been worried about the security issues.

This is one more thing pushing me in that direction.

It's not really changed.

To be honest, I don't think it so much of an issue any more. I have a library of parts I use regularly and just design footprints for new parts.

I'm my case, I doubt that Altium would have footprints for many of the parts I want to use anyway (quite often cheap connectors, switches etc). I feel like being comfortable with footprint design is an important part of the design process.

That said, there are many features of Altium that look very attractive. For example the push and shove routing.

This is a really nice tutorial, not just on keyboard PCB design but Kicad in general.

I also recommend the excellent "getting to blinky" videos:

https://contextualelectronics.com/learning/getting-to-blinky...

Which teach the basics of Kicad too.

An unrelated but interesting point he noted was that Apple are one of the only vendors that provide long term firmware updates (he mentioned 8 years). It's a shame nobody else really does this.

In summary: Coreboot+Linux as a bootloader

I think I've seen this before in an HPC context. But they've build a firmware distribution called Heads. It boots using coreboot then fires up a Linux kernel from flash.

The kernel is then used as a second stage bootloader. It takes about 2 seconds to get Linux booted from flash.

They can then boot the system OS, optionally using kexec to smoothly transition to the system kernel.

Very neat! Along the way they've also done other important work, like put together a minimal firmware for the Management engine (a second CPU in Intel system with its own OS, and many many issues).

The biggest problem here is same issue that coreboot has. Coreboot support is really limited. I think it down supports Lenovo X220s, but late time I looked not much modern hardware.

Why do so many MongoDB installation lack a password on the Admin account?

I tried search for me info, but could find anything. Was this the default? Procedure given in a popular tutorial? It seems pretty insane.

Interesting idea. I use Ad-blockers but I'm not so sure I'd go so far as to encourage other people to use them, each to their own.

A Lenovo X200 running Debian which I paid 50USD for. I use a 128Gb SSD (which cost more than the laptop). My daily contracting rate is more than 10x the cost of the laptop, but this setup just works really well for me.

When my daughter pours water in the keyboard I just get a new one and don't have to care too much.

It's clear that he was lucky to have a school teacher who inspired him from an early age and effected his world view significantly.

I guess he got lucky, but as a parent I worry about this. He points out that most educational establishments don't encourage individual exploration, and that was my experience too.

Makes me consider home schooling, but that seems like a less than ideal solution too. Do we just have to rely on luck?

The hardware is google home. Software is less clear, someone said it was cleverbot.

I guess I was looking for a lower bound. I'll be surprised if they can manage to implement this on their cheapest products.

Looking through their site the cheapest home applicances that LG sells are microwaves.

They cost on the order of 100USD for the cheapest models. The cheapest Wifi "IoT" microcontrollers are on the order of 1USD.

Seems like it might be a reasonable business move, even if it's just a box ticking exercise.

I'll be surprised if they do put them in their lowest end products though. Perhaps those product lines are stable and won't be updated in 2017?

If I'm honest with myself I have to admit that a general purpose human level, strong AI would shake my world view significantly.

For that reason, I find it difficult to have a completely unbiased opinion on our current state of progress.

But... while we seem to be making great progress, it seems like we're a long way off understanding how the human mind works.

AlphaGo was an amazing achievement, but I think it's unlikely that the human mind tackles Go in the same way.

It's obviously possible that there are multiple routes to a general human level intelligence. But I think it's still unclear if the way AI is currently being developed is one of them.

Doesn't make it right, but doesn't seem worth mentioning if you're talking about specific issues with Google, rather than websites in general.

No, this is true.

I wonder how hard that would be.

Check out w3m (which has some graphics support).

There's also Netsurf, I've not used it but it. Looks awesome: http://www.netsurf-browser.org

Polifact: http://www.politifact.com

Seems to be doing a pretty good job.

I don't think there are any hard and fast rules.

If the new hires told you their salaries the difficulty is discussing it without revealing this fact. Management sometimes frowns on that.

If the pay range was publicly disclosed in an advert that would be the best way to go.

In general however it seems like an entirely reasonable thing to do. Just don't get too aggressive.

His reasoning that it uses "non-free JavaScript" seems a bit redundant these days (given that almost every site does).

I always value Stallman's commitment, but it's often impractical to maintain while being a productive member of society.

Keeps me considering the possibility of freer alternatives though, and I find it valuable for that reason alone.

I'd love it if the default was to use some very lightweight WebRTC app where you just created a new link for each conversation.

I don't think it's likely to happen any time soon unfortunately.

Regarding Facebook, it still feels weird, I'm not sure I can put my finger on exactly why. I just want to keep "friends" and "business" totally separate.

I think the original question was querying if the runtime is statically or dynamically linked.

It's also possibly a subtle dig at go, because unlike other languages go does not use dynamic linking, meaning bugs in libraries require recompilation (has positive effects too).

Interesting. I can't see myself using it for work though, which the majority of my Skype calls tend to be.

Yes... a world in which Sarah Palin is apologizing to Assange isn't one I understand very well.

How they respond to the Trump administration when it's in power will tell us a lot about what's happening at wikileaks.

But it seems like the world needs more diversity in Wikileaks-like services. I feel like they have done important work in the past, and it would be a shame for that to end.

Another reason not to use Skype is that their support is pretty poor.

They've deleted Skype numbers from my account without warning. Someone linked my and my wife's account because we used them on the same PC, and refuse to unlink Skype and Microsoft accounts.

I'd love to find an alternative, but given that everybody already has Skype accounts the lock-in is pretty significant.

Don't much like the alternatives Stallman proposes. Using long distance phone calls seems worse than Skype, phone companies have provided governments with even more access to user data than most tech companies.

I don't really get the appeal of voice prompted ordering. Is there really a big enough market of people for whom this is more than a novelty?

For many products, you want to do at least some research before ordering. For products you order regularly, reordering is usually only a couple of clicks/taps.

I think this is a little overstated (not much but a little).

I just read through their Yelp reviews (shockingly they're pretty good). What surprised me most was that doctors were sending people to Theranos centers to get tested. Perhaps the doctors should be similarly liable? FDA certainly screwed up also.

You're second point feels like a bigger issue. VCs seems to make some absolutely awful and huge investments in healthcare/science/biotech. Throw 100s of millions at companies based on the CEOs personally, and seemingly do little to no DD. I don't get it.

This attitude crushes many potential companies. Particularly science-based startups with CEOs with the ability to execute, and good technical background but who can't sell as well as someone like Holmes.

If we could get VCs to make saner decisions in health care that would be a major step forward for society.

The title here omits the name of the series this was published in "A time of endings".

The article is really about the death and re-birth of Activision. It covers the role the Baer patent played in this, rather beautifully.

I was really impressed by this great long read, will have to go back and read the rest of these articles. We so often focus on success, it's interesting to read detailed accounts of how things fail.