Kelbit

Simple is not available in Canada, which is what the above poster is referring to. Few (no?) Canadian banks offer email notifications for debit (Interac) transactions.

Yep. This is going to be the next cold fusion - the device will soon be debunked, but we will still be hearing about it from conspiracy theorists for decades.

Avoid the new gTLDs. Most are mismanaged crap. The gTLD system was the greedist and worst decision ICANN ever made.

Stick with tried and true domains - ideally .com, but your country's ccTLD is another good choice.

The consensus standard for this sort of test is IEEE 1528, and you are absolutely correct. The test uses a gel phantom (the standard provides a few formulations for different frequencies but most are a mixture of water, salt, sugar, and a thickener) and it is poked at with a sensitive probe to measure local temperature rise.

Agreed! But that wasn't the message that Bay Street took from it.

There is the new Canadian SBIR analog (Innovative Solutions Canada [1]) which looks like a big step in the right direction.

It's having some issues getting off the ground though, it just kicked off a few months ago and I think they are way behind handing out funding. There's only been a handful of challenges and not many applicants (I submitted a proposal, which was serialized as a submission number just over 300). They are supposed to be distributing about $100M/yr, or 1% of the federal R&D budget.

[1] http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/101.nsf/eng/home

There's no contradiction. Two things are happening here.

Foreigners in the US (H1B applicants) are heading up to Canada because the immigration policies are more lax.

Canadian citizens from Canada are heading down to the US because the salaries are higher, and under NAFTA Canadian engineers qualify for an easy-to-get instant visa (TN status).

That already happened, to a degree. Canada's dot-com darling was Nortel, which at peak accounted for 1/3 of the total valuation on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Then the bubble burst and Nortel collapsed. A lot of institutional investors swore off tech after that, and it hasn't really rebounded.

It was not the Bay Area, he was working in Seattle.

I think it's more a case of VCs not being calibrated to the real cost of doing business. Canada is a first world country with a GDP per capita not much less than the states. There is plenty of wealth available that could be invested in tech. It's just Bay Street generally doesn't want to, because they don't understand the tech business.

Name one prominent Canadian VC firm - I can't think of any, and I'm Canadian. But ask me about US firms, and I can name firms like Sequioa, a16z, and BVP. We don't have that here.

The real fix is to provide appropriate incentives to build a technology industry. Unfortunately, programs to date have been rife for abuse and mainly only benefit those who know how to game the system (see the scandals around IRAP/SRED consultants).

The new government has introduced a Canadian equivalent to SBIR, called Innovative Solutions Canada [1], which seems very promising. It's basically a carbon copy of the American SBIR program, which had had a remarkable impact in the US for bootstrapping small high tech firms that are too risky for VCs to the point where they can seek investment.

The other piece of the puzzle is the VC environment. Canada simply does not have a cadre of experienced venture capitalists with access to funds and willingness to take risks. Until that changes, Canadian tech companies will continue to hop the border after reaching a certain size, because it's in their best interest to leave for the US where funding is better.

[1] http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/101.nsf/eng/home

If Canadian companies were willing to offer a competitive salary, maybe Canadian grads would stay. It doesn't even have to be 1:1 with the US, even 75% would be nice.

As it is, there is little incentive to stay here. I know a new grad who was faced with the choice of staying in Canada to earn $40-50k CAD per year starting, or heading to the US where he had a job offer with one of the big five for $120k USD plus signing bonus. Guess which option he chose?

Canadian tech companies love to complain about lack of talent, but they're not willing to pay for it, and they seem oblivious to the fact that we have a professional worker mobility agreement with our southern neighbors that makes it very easy to get a visa.

Something's gotta change.

But USB-C isn't limited to 5V, power delivery is at 20V. That might explain what's going on here (since the user reports 20V on the output) - it thinks that the peripheral is a power hungry device and it's trying to charge it. That's a problem, but it could be that the peripheral is poorly designed and is mistakenly asking for power that it can't actually handle.

This was my interpretation, the host sets the output voltage to 20V incorrectly (due to a software bug or a hardware failure). Putting a crowbar circuit defensively on the peripheral side would save the peripheral.

As an electrical engineer - I think incidents like these are a pretty solid argument for incorporating overvoltage protection into 5V USB peripherals.

Even something as simple as a zener clamp with a polyfuse to make a dead-simple crowbar circuit will save a device and won't contribute a whole lot to BOM cost.

Ultrasound processing is actually pretty niche: you have a whole bunch of channels with a very high sample rate (tens of MHz). In the case of medical ultrasound, a typical handheld ultrasound probe can have range from 50 to 150 parallel channels.

Because you need fast, parallel DSP, FPGAs actually really shine for ultrasound. And because production volumes are relatively low, the NRE to jump to an ASIC generally isn't justified. Just about every modern ultrasound machine does signal processing on an FPGA.

I'm not talking about serious violent crimes like child molestation or aggravated assault or murder. Those sorts of things should show up forever.

I'm talking about things like petty theft, drug possession/petty trafficking, and impaired driving. Those are crimes that people can change from.

Again, that would be similar to a credit report - here in Canada, for example, the bureaus are legally mandated to not report certain credit events after a prescribed amount of time. A similar rule could apply to background checks for employment, where certain less serious offenses have a "sunset period" where they fall off the report.

The trouble with court records is that they are public, and for good reason (the justice system needs to be transparent). Unfortunately, the internet has made what used to be a process with a significant barrier to entry (a manual court records search) into a simple google search. The problem is exacerbated by extortionists who post mugshots (many of people who have their charges dropped) and charge a fee to remove them [1]. Regulation which enforces some level of right to be forgotten may be a solution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_publishing_industry

I think the intent of a background check in the context of employment is also to predict future behavior. An employer really shouldn't care that an applicant was busted for drug possession in college fifteen years ago - there's little change of reoffending, and the crime isn't super relevant to the performance of most jobs. On the other hand, if an applicant for a position at a hedge fund has a conviction for securities fraud three years' prior, you would not want to hire that person.

I think there's an argument in favor of requiring criminal background checks for employment to be run through bureaus that have a legal requirement to drop certain offenses off the report after a certain amount of time. The offender has repaid their debt to society through the punishment meted out by the court, there is no point in making them unemployable for the rest of their lives.

I don't know why criminal record checks aren't treated similar to a credit bureau report. There is a legal time limit as to how long a bad debt or bankruptcy can stay on a report, as the people who wrote the credit reporting laws recognized that people can change. But a criminal record, even for a minor crime, lives forever unless explicitly expunged.

It's pretty amazing that some coworking spaces manage to have bad WiFi. Like, there are three requirements for a functioning coworking space: desks, meeting rooms, and internet access. Focus on those before building the cereal bar.

Quick back of the envelope calculation:

Wing area of a Cessna 172 (representative GA aircraft) is 16 m^2.

Best-case insolation on a sunny day with no clouds at high noon is around 1000 W/m^2.

Best commercially available solar cells are the triple-junction cells used on commercial satellites, at about 30% efficient. They are horrendously expensive (around $50-100k per square meter), but we will ignore economics for now.

16 m^2 * 1000 W m^2 * 0.3 = 4.8 kW.

Powerplant for a Cessna 173 is a 160 hp piston engine, or 120 kW. So, we're about an order of magnitude and a half off. The cells also aren't massless, so they will add weight and reduce range... you'd need to do a cost/benefit there.

There are a couple solar UAVs in existence (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinetiq_Zephyr) which use super lightweight materials and have very large wing areas to support solar cells. Even then, they are really on the hairy edge of where physics works in your favor.

Related to this story from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16853203

Keep us informed. I'll chip in.

In this case, most of the documents were public, but there were a small number which had confidential information and were inappropriately stored on the public portal.

The EU has a population of over half a billion people and a GDP per capita of $41k PPP (although those numbers will shrink a little bit post-Brexit). Ignoring Europe as a potential market ignores half the western world - and it is westerners, for the most part, who have disposable income to spend money on goods and services.

Ignore Europe if you like. Just be aware that you are allowing your competitors to gain an uncontested foothold without having to fight for it. Once they are the incumbent in the European market, they will be hard to unseat, even if you change your mind later.

Get either a Hakko FX888D or a Weller WES51. I personally prefer the Hakko, but both are excellent stations that cost under $150 which will serve you for years if you take care of them.

A note - soldering stations usually come with a cheap conical tip as a starter tip. Pay an extra $20 or so to buy two chisel tips: a tiny one for fine work, and a big one for larger work. The flat surface allows you to apply more heat to the joint. Take care of your tips (ie: keep them tinned, don't leave the iron on too hot, and don't scrub too hard with the brass sponge) and the tips should last a few years without trouble.

Mobile number checks are almost trivial to circumvent - you can get a DID with SMS capability from a VOIP provider for under a buck, just use it once and throw it away.

Vancouver SkyTrain opened in 1985 and was fully automated from day one. The rolling stock used on the majority of the system (Bombardier ART) was specifically designed for driverless operation.

Interestingly, at the time the Vancouver SkyTrain was undergoing construction, the same tech was being installed in Toronto for the Scarborough rapid transit line. The transit union in Toronto opposed automation, so the trains had to be specially modified to add operator cabins so the trains could be driven manually. Vancouver was able to get away with it because the system was a greenfield project, there was no union of subway workers around already to oppose automating the trains.

It wouldn't be the first time. The practice of giving diamond engagement rings was a result of a very clever marketing campaign by De Beers ("diamonds are forever").

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/diamond-de-beers-marketin...

This is fairly common practice in the medical device field. Volumes for specialized equipment are far too low to justify the NRE on custom solutions, so many low-volume medical devices integrate COTS solutions wherever possible.

It doesn't help that vendors are generally nervous about liability in medical equipment (this fear is often unfounded, but persistent). As a result, vendors of commercial and industrial equipment generally don't want to engage medical device OEMs with engineering and customization support. If there had been that sort of support in this case, Oculus might have made a custom build without the cert check, just as a de-risking measure.

This vendor reluctance is especially present at the FDA Class III (high risk device) level - most vendors outright prohibit use of their devices in these products. It's an open secret that this still happens anyway in a wink-wink nudge-nudge fashion, just without vendor support - which is arguably worse, but it keeps the lawyers happy.