algoshift

Reaching a mass of people via Facebook is, to some degree, relatively easy. If you have 50 to 100 people you can reach directly and they, in turn, reach out to their direct connections you'll "touch" a pile of people quickly.

However, from that to getting people to take action --be it install and app, vote for a cause, visit a website-- that's an entirely different matter.

In our case one of the things we came across is a demographic that simply does not use Facebook. Older parents of the very kids we are trying to help.

The next issue was triggered by a dialog that pops-up when you click on the vote button. Facebook tells you that you are about to share your profile and your friends list. Of course a lot of people recoiled at that immediately. The last thing parents of children with special needs want to do is open the doors to their facebook account. I get it. I absolutely do. We probably lost hundreds of potential supporters this way. It is perfectly understandable. I don't understand why facebook would not have the option to be able to simply log in or vote on something as a means of identifying yourself yet without granting access to your life (or projecting the fear of this happening).

I suppose the efficacy of trying to build an audience through facebook depends on your demographic. If your audience lives on facebook it is probably a great channel. If you audience does not or if they are concerned about their privacy there could be issues.

I've learned Facebook and LinkedIn can produce really disappointing results.

Over the last couple of weeks we've been pushing hard to develop awareness for a worthy cause (special needs education tools). Details here:

http://www.tommyteaches.com/special-education.php

(Yes, taking the opportunity to also get a little attention on HN. Sorry, this is important.)

Analytics tells us that LinkedIn, in particular didn't have good engagement. A few strategic posts on CraigsList probably did ten times better LinkedIn.

The best results we got have been due to friends, family, neighbors and local teachers making a push to reach to their immediate connections (their friends, family and co-workers) to have them engage. Also some blogs produced results here and there.

In general terms building an audience for just about anything on the internet is really hard these days. Luck can be a factor, but more and more it seems to require a lot of hard work and "street smarts". For example, I contacted every host at a local TV station with slightly different versions of the same story in order to see if anyone would be interested. Call it A/B testing. One was, and that helped a bit (just a bit).

Good luck with your app. It looks interesting.

I guess the point of the short comment was lost: How can anyone say that any of the current crop of OS's is "wonderful"? Wonderful? Really?

Whether you use Windows or OSX (or both, as is my case) you can probably rattle off a sizable list of how these OS's have gotten screwed-up by their respective publishers. Someone saying "<OS name> is wonderful" and then going on about the reason it actually isn't is very funny.

Again, the comment was OS agnostic even though the thread is about OSX.

> OS X is wonderful

ROFL

Here you go:

http://www.tak2000.com/data/Satellite_TC.pdf

Can a privately launched satellite in orbit be considered free from control from any one nation? Would my satellite be sovereign territory?

Might this be an idea for the future of DNS and highly-independent web hosting in some form? No cooling problems for shure!

Of course, there's the minor issue of a connection to the wired internet...

I want a .orbital TLD!

Forget the "cloud" how about "space"?

Hmmmm, isn't there a prominent web entrepreneur who's building a rocket company?

I do wish that they would have included data on the exact measurement setup. IR thermometers are affected by surface material characteristics and can be affected by orientation and distance to the DUT. Thermocouples would provide the most reliable measurements. Barring that, we've always resorted to applying black non-reflective masking tape to the spot to be measured in order to eliminate surface effects. The next step is to ensure that the thermometer is normal to the surface and that all measurements are taken from the same distance.

It is likely that some of the extra heating is coming from the display. This post covers it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3740270

There's probably nothing seriously wrong with it new iPad though. People probably aren't used to having a processor that gets hotter with usage so close to their hands. I have multiple laptops that get to hot to be on your lap. This is nothing new.

Prompted by an offline discussion I thought it'd be a good idea to talk about the other effects. I focused my post around the power requirements of the image processor circuitry. However, there are two additional components to an LCD display system: Display logic and Backlight power.

Display logic is, as the name implies, all of the circuitry required to drive the pixels. This is everything from the data connector on the raw LCD panel up to and including the TFT transistors on the glass itself and the transparent interconnects (also on the glass). The on-glass circuitry has complex parasitics and capacitive loading that also causes a fluctuation of drive current based on the randomness of the images.

Here's sample data from a 24 inch 1920 x 1200 LCD:

  24 inch, 1920 x 1200
  Idd  for full black screen = 1,700mA
  Idd for a black/white dot pattern = 3,050mA

In very (very!) rough terms this current is also a function of display resolution: Twice as many pixels will demand double the current. Going back to the iPad 2 vs 3 example, the the new iPad has exactly four times the pixels of the iPad 2 display, therefore, it should require four times more display logic current than the older model under all uses cases.

The backlight may or may not demand more current as display resolution increases. Comparisons of displays of equal physical size but vastly different resolutions do not reveal a this effect to be an absolute rule. A lot depends on the design of the panel and the internal optics.

You are right, of course, however, I have built quite elaborate LED-based backlight systems and have metrics on this too. A few years ago we did a custom system with a 1,000 Watt (yes, one thousand) custom liquid-cooled RGB LED backlight. Performance depends on many things, from aperture ratios to the spectral transmission characteristics of the filters as well as how they match the emission spectra of the backlight elements.

With regards to getting in touch, email me at martin_05 the domain is rocketmail and TLD is .com

You are welcome.

I'd sure like to know if those who are for this sort of thing have any experience building and flying these things. It's really easy to voice opinions from the outside. Armed with experience your opinion is sure to change. I don't think I know of anyone involved with RC as a hobby or even among my aerospace friends who would not cringe at the idea of having swarms of unsafe little drones flying around a city.

Once again, Mark Twain said it best: "He who holds a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way".

I've been flying model airplanes, helicopters and other RC contraptions since I was 10 years old. Decades. I've flown, designed and built nearly everything out there, from pure (no motor) gliders to aerobatic planes, electric and turbine jets, helicopters and multi-copters --even an occasional RC blimp. One of my favorites are very high power-to-weight ratio 2 meter-ish gliders with thousands of watts of power. They go straight-up like a rocket and reach incredible speeds, well in excess of 100 miles per hour (youtube: F5B glider).

The preface is to say: I get it. I do it. I love it. And, I'll probably stay in this hobby forever. Having kids has a way to help with that.

Having said that, I also understand, in no uncertain terms, just how dangerous this stuff can be. I have seen many nasty accidents first hand. A small propeller spinning at 5K or 10K RPM can shred a hand or a face in horrific ways.

The idea of toy drones flying around town is a scary one. The FAA is right in wanting to exercise restraint and gradually walk into a sensible set of rules. The have been working very closely with the RC flight community in order to understand the needs and voice their concern as well:

http://www.modelaircraft.org/aboutama/gov.aspx

I love the idea of small inexpensive drones coming online to help firefighting efforts, disaster aid and such needs. Still, it has to be done right and it has to be done with safety in mind.

Small inexpensive model aircraft, even when they cost thousands of dollars, are not designed to the same strict engineering standards of full-scale aircraft in general aviation. Most of these devices suffer from catastrophic single-point failures in their designs. None of them are put through strict process control during manufacturing to ensure that such mundane things as cracked or "cold" solder joints don't creep into a batch. None of them are made with conformal or environmental coatings applied to circuitry. Not one of them uses rugged, vibration and environmentally-tested hardware, boards, wiring, connectors and batteries.

As an example of this, a prominent motor controller manufacturer recently produced designs that started to violently catch on fire and even blow-up under varied conditions. They have been reported to catch fire by simply plugging in a battery or in the middle of a flight. In a lot of cases people have lost helicopters costing thousands of dollars to this particular problem. However, in most cases, because the activity took place within the confines of AMA model aircraft flying fields not one person seems to have been hurt and no property (other than the model and electronics) was damaged.

Did you know that the LiPo (Lithium Polymer) battery packs these models use can also spontaneously catch fire and explode? YouTube search: "LiPo fire"

It's exciting to think of these little things flying about and doing all kinds of things for us. The reality, I think, is as far away as building a C3PO that actually works as it does in the movie. OK, maybe not that far, but nowhere close to reality. The legal and liability hurdles alone are massive.

Can someone make a quadcopter that can safely and reliably fly around buildings in a city with an acceptably low probability of failure, redundancy and solid engineering? Sure. But it isn't going to be anything like these little toys we are seeing in hundreds upon hundreds of youtube demos.

I believe that, once the FAA has a chance to sort this out there will be really good opportunities for very high quality, professionally designed drones. It'll be a few years though. And rightly so.

Nah. Not hard. Different. People have a natural inclination to resist the new. My guess is that a competent programmer with OO experience should be comfortable with Objective-C within a week or two of study.

That's really funny partner. Using Excel for generating code fragments that can be cut and pasted into your compiler is powerful and fast. Nothing wrong with it. But, go ahead and don't. I love compete with others doing thing less efficiently. Makes me smile.

Of course. This was just one illustration of Excel as an augmentation tool. There are probably thousands of such special applications out there, some commercial, some not, that used Excel this way.

The greater point, perhaps, is that making things prettier at the expense of raw functionality isn't always the best idea.

For the record, on first inspection I like the outer appearance of VS 2011. I like the pictographic icons and clean uncluttered appearance. I hope that this effort did not come at the expense of function elsewhere. We'll upgrade when it comes out of beta and see.

>It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users

Excel is another of my favorite "Why did they do that?" examples. In my opinion, MS absolutely ruined Excel somewhere in the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. If you were a power user with Excel'03 you felt like a total idiot with Excel'07. And, this wasn't a matter of a few buttons here and there. The thing was almost utterly unusable compared to what you could do with the '03 version. Furthermore, they complicated the usage of VBA modules. If you had a library of VBA work that you used regularly you, all of a sudden, found yourself scratching your head trying to figure out how to do some pretty basic stuff.

I use Excel extensively for automated code generation. Simple examples are the generation of repetitive lookup table code in various languages. Or code to pre-stuff database tables. Or maintaining a complex LUT-driven state machine. I have custom Excel tools that have taken months to develop that do increase productivity in a measurable way. For example, one tool uses Excel to auto-magically write the code (LUT, callbacks, etc.) for a menu system on an embedded device with an LCD display. Before the tool it'd take hours, if not a couple of days, to maintain. After the custom VBA tool it was a matter of minutes.

Anyhow, upon switching to '07 (mostly a forced switch because I needed to migrate to a 64 bit OS for Finite Element Analysis work) I went from light speed to crawling. That, to me, is not an improvement. I am OK with learning new things, you have to be open to it if you want to remain in this game, but sometimes you can't help but scratch your head and try to figure out what the hell they were thinking.

Thankfully that was easily solved with a VM running XP and Excel'03.

> Why not experiment and try to be better at what you do?

Herein lies the problem. The term "better" is most definitely subjective.

Not to pic on Xcode, but this is a prime example of focusing too much on making a consumer appliance rather than a professional tool. Like I said: I don't want iTunes, I want a kick-ass IDE.

I'm in the middle of a project that has, quite literally, thousands of assets to manage (images, audio, video). The thousands of files end-up piled-up without any semblance of organization in the project directory. I mean, who woke up one day and though "This is a good idea!" when you have a perfectly good file system to take advantage of? Updating assets is an absolute nightmare.

Yes, yes, there are crafty work-arounds. Each with its own pros-and-cons. The point is that the IDE itself was designed to totally ignore the underlying file system. Let's put it this way: If I wrote code like that at the many jobs I've had over the years I would have gotten fired in a microsecond. Yet, for some reason, this is "feature" is now considered good design?

Back to coding.

It isn't clear if you meant to imply that Apple has made better decisions with Xcode. If that is what you are saying, I firmly disagree. This isn't meant to imply that MS is better. Having said that, I don't mind complexity in UI for professional tools. I've been programming for longer than a lot of people on this list have been alive (an assumption on my part). You learn the tool you have to use and move on. No big deal.

I have problems with dumb-ass decisions that make your job harder. Like compilers that don't accept /a/path/that has/spaces/in the string/. Or the absolutely dumb-founding way Xcode does not let you organize your files in a real file structure, you know, with directories and stuff, in the file system. Or how hard Xcode makes it to create use and maintain code libraries. I don't need my IDE to look and act like an iTunes clone. Thank you very much. Pretty doesn't matter to me. Easy and incredibly flexible and functional does. I mean, take the way they've absolutely ruined documentation access in Xcode 4 when compared to Xcode 3. True to iTunes style, the Organizer is overloaded with all kinds of crap it probably shouldn't do.

Anyhow, no tool is perfect, but there are salient examples of the less-than-perfect even in 2012.

I have a potential project that would involve testing somewhere in the range of 500 Cassandra nodes. What are the best tools to use in load testing such installations? Is everything pretty much custom?

Scaled integers give you an instant and very significant boost in performance. And, what's best, in most cases the error is far smaller than 1%. I've done tons of real-time image processing work on FPGA's where you almost never use floating point hardware due to how resource intensive (and slow) it is.

Another construct that is extremely fast, cheap and can even represent nonlinear and discontinous relationships is the good-old lookup table. In hardware (FPGA) you get one result per clock cycle.

Now, of course, if you can deal with the error and name the tune with just a handful of transistors it could be a good tool to have.

It might make more sense to have a hybrid. Build a CPU that includes a traditional FPU as well as a "physics-based" FPU. Then the programmer can decide which way to go by trading off between accuracy and deterministic behavior against speed and errors.

Multiple reasons for this:

First, too many stories along the lines of "I built this app for $1,000 in India and it is making me $50K per month".

Second, kids who don't know how to value their time who'll work like slaves for $2,000.

Third, bad programmers who deliver product cheaply enough, however, the underlying code is an absolute mess. They charge nothing, throw it together and move on.

Fourth, people tend to come up with an idea of what it is that they want to pay for something and try to fit that something to that number. When it comes to software that's like the square-peg -> round-hole problem. I've been to countless meetings where the other side says things like "We'd like to do this for no more than $10K" ... and then they describe an intense six-month, four-person job.

You can always try to educate. Sometimes that works. It can be painful. What you don't want to do is be the educator and have someone else walk away with the work for less (even if it is 1%) than what you would charge. So, don't invest any time unless you know that there's a really good probability of getting the deal.

With all due respect, if YC wants to focus on something outside your standard fair I'd suggest you look at the problem of manufacturing. The NY Times article that is the subject of another HN post is right on the money as far as the issues surrounding manufacturing --of just about anything-- outside of China.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and...

If you want to give back to the country, principles and culture that quite literally gave you everything you are today I'd suggest putting money and brain-power to work on this very problem. Develop new advanced automated manufacturing technologies that the world has yet to even imagine. Develop new work-flows, materials and processes. Develop new supply chain paradigms and environmentally-friendly systems. Develop tech that will bring back millions upon millions of jobs lost to, effectively, slave labor.

Make Artificial Intelligence and Robotics the next big thing. This is the future.

Hollywood, is doing a good job of destructing itself. And, in the grand scheme of things, they are just about insignificant.

Have you ever tried to run an FEA tool (say, Solidworks Flow Simulation) or a rendering tool (say, Modo) on a virtual machine? Bad idea.

Yes. VM's have their place. No. They don't solve the underlying problem for all application cases. As applications get more and more advanced and the need for performance increases VM's are simply not a viable option.

"startup" as a term of trade might be accepted within certain circles. Beyond that I think it sounds really dumb to anyone who's been in business for more than a few seconds.

One of my favorite WTF? phrases is "start a startup", particularly when uttered with the "gummy" California speech pattern of a 17-year-old.

Hmmm. "Start a Business", that's what you want to do. What the hell is "start a startup"? Some kind of a recursive call? Does it imply that you are in that mode forever?

When are you done "starting a startup"?

I can see someone saying "We are going to launch an experimental business to test an idea" or "We are going to test an idea for a business" or "We launched a business to test a few ideas". Now that make sense. The term "startup" is amorphous and "start a startup" sounds even dumber.

Oh, yes, then there's "do a startup".

Asimo is a marketing toy. It wouldn't be able to navigate through a child's playroom, much less an environment full of hazards. The walking technology they are using is exactly one hundred percent wrong for anything "real world".

Looks great though.

I am simply saying, in a very simple way, that opinion on certain topics is only valid when it comes from the right perspective. This has nothing to do with personal principles or morality. It's business (and reality) 101.

BTW, I say this from the perspective of having lived on both sides of that equation. I've even done things like not taking home a paycheck during bad times in order to make payroll and keep people employed. Business isn't black-and-white and it is usually far harder than it looks from the outside.

Start a company. Hire some people. Run it for, say, ten years. Come back and review what you just said.

Mark Twain: Someone holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

There are multiple sources of processing delay in a TV image processor. The two main sources are the scaling and de-interlacing blocks. Scaling is pretty benign. A cheap scaler will introduce somewhere in the order of four lines of delay. A more advanced scaler might do 16 or 32 lines. These are lines of video. If we are talking about 1080, then 16 lines is 16/1080th of a frame. In other words, not insignificant for TV applications.

The de-interlacing block is where most of the delay comes from. Interlaced video (standard definition, 1080i, etc.) only transmits half the lines per field. This means that the processor has to synthesize the missing pixels in order to have full frames to display. A really cheap de-interlacer can be done with just a few lines of delay. You wouldn't want this as it would introduce bad imaging artifacts. Pretty much all consumer TVs use a method called "motion adaptive de-interlacing" (MADI). There are many implementations of MADI. In general terms you use data from frames before and after the one you want to process in order to detect pixels that have moved. Those that did not move can simply be replicated or averaged into the missing slots. Anything that moved requires different treatment. The key here is that you need to store a couple of frames worth of video before you can start with MADI. That's your two frames of delay (or more).

There might be other delays introduced by other subsystems such as the receiver.

Right. One of the rules is "be nice".

OK. This article is flawed and many of the comments are just as flawed. Having been involved in the design and manufacturing of LCD displays (down to writing all FPGA image processing code, scaling, deinterlacing, etc.) I think I can say that none of this is accurate if the intent is to apply it generally.

Caveat: If you buy a TV don't expect it to be a computer monitor. Most TV designs are just that: TV sets. They are made to do one thing reasonably well: Take a crappy satellite/cable/whatever signal and give you a reasonable image back.

EDID can be programmed with any resolution you want. Do you need 921 x 333 at 12 frames per second? No problem. There is no such thing as a resolution not being available in EDID. Standards are one thing, but the EDID mechanism isn't inherently limited by standards.

BTW, there are commercially available EDID modifier gadgets that allow you to modify the EDID readout from the monitor. So, the monitor says one thing and your computer (or whatever device) receives your programmed values.

If you need a TV that will play nice with a computer you need to find one that was explicitly designed to do so.

Most consumer TVs use one of a very few commercially available processor chips to do their image processing. With a few exceptions they all do the same kinds of things. And no, the signals are rarely converted to YCbCr 4:2:2 internally but for the absolute cheapest and crappiest of processors. All the good ones convert the input to a common internal integer RGB format. The nice ones might standardize at 12 bits per channel (36 bits total) internally. When I did custom FPGA video processing we went as far as 24 bits per channel in order to avoid truncation of calculated values until the very last moment. This can make a huge difference depending on the application.

In general terms "monitor mode", if you will, should be a mode that bypasses as much of the internal processing as possible. You can force this bypass by using and EDID modifier gadget programmed for the actual resolution and timings of the panel. In other words, open the back of the TV, get the panel model number, get the data-sheet and program the EDID modifier to output these values to your computer. The processor should push this straight to the panel and you get very little, if any, processing. Again, this does not work on all TVs. As I said before, they are designed to be TVs, not monitors.

That said, I've connected many computers to off-the-shelf, un-modified, consumer TVs via DVI and HDMI. I have yet to run into any real issues.

How many websites does a typical Internet user visit in a year? If you discover ten new websites per day that would be less than 4,000 sites. Let's make that 40K sites per year. It is absolutely trivial to have the client computer handle DNS for these sites. Maybe that's the way the industry pushes back on ignorant politicians: Obsolete their law before it can even affect the system. Decentralize DNS and put it in the hands of every single Internet user and every single device connected to the Internet.