cmicali

Congrats on an impressive achievement and milestone. This is a great outcome, great work, and an indication of how far the hardware industry/tooling has come.

This feels though a little to me like building a simple SaaS service, and deploying it on a managed cloud service, and concluding all software is really easy!

This project is near to (if not at) the easy end of the hardware product difficulty/complexity spectrum. Some great choices were made to keep it simple and therefor easy.

An alternate take-away: "If you keep things simple, hardware doesn't have to be as hard"

I agree and appreciate you calling this out.

It’s easy to not understand the impact or meaning of referring to violence in a flip way when one has never had to have experienced it.

I’m glad to see someone else that loves objective-c as much as I do. It is delightful.

It’s a fantastic language and tools. I wish it had had more time to polish, expand, and potentially grow beyond mainly Mac and iOS before swift happened.

I bought a machine with a 75Mhz blue lightning "486" as an upgrade to a 386SX/20. It was sold as the budget 486 at the time, and I learned the lesson the hard way that sometimes budget really does mean a lot worse!

Performance wasn't great and compatibility was an issue more than you'd expect.

At Sense we make a home energy monitor that provides real-time appliance-level monitoring using machine learning. Hardware is indeed hard as everyone said it would be!

https://sense.com

Throttle house did a video on this car over the summer: https://youtu.be/1uqgHZxBE8A

Hi HN - I built a Winamp-like audio player for Mac. I buy/download a lot of music and could not find an audio file player that was lightweight, made it easy to skip through and audition tracks, and native to MacOS.

I'm interested in feedback or anyone that would like to help collaborate on it, either programming or design, the latter of which could definitely use some help. Thanks!

I've got a working macOS Winamp-inspired music player I've been working on. I was thinking of open-sourcing - anyone here interested in something like this?

I bought two play:5 v1s from the Sonos web site in late 2014, so 5.5 years ago. Today they announce the are EOL in May. This wouldn't be so bad except for this part of the announcement:

"Please note that because Sonos is a system, all products operate on the same software. If modern products remain connected to legacy products after May, they also will not receive software updates and new features."

So if I keep my 5 year old speakers the rest of my system will also not receive updates and may become non-functional.

This kind of anti-customer behavior is a great way to ensure your evangelists abandon your brand permanently.

The BeatsX are as close as you can get right now. Same ease of use/pairing/sound quality, if you can live with the cord in connected the two buds.

Strongly disagree. I think this is the cynical view, and I'm sure is valid in many companies, but raising potential issues early is really important - other people can't fix problems if they don't know about them. It sounds like you have visibility into a problem that others may not, tell them! Don't assume people already know.

Like some of the other posts said - be real. If people don't respond well to this then the company has a bigger problem than a slipped schedule.

Sense | Senior Product Manager | Boston / Cambridge, MA | Full-time | ONSITE | https://sense.com

We build Sense, the home energy monitor that uses advanced DSP & distributed machine learning to detect and track the energy use of devices in your home.

Sense is looking for an experienced product manager to lead the discovery, design, and launch of new products that serve companies who deploy Sense at scale, like solar installers, electric utilities, energy efficiency companies, and more. We will depend on you to research and understand these markets, discover and design solutions, and lead cross-functional teams to design, build, launch, and iterate on new products.

We also have openings in * Data Science * Marketing * Engineering

https://sense.com/careers.html

I remember heartquake! I could probably play the credits part of the music by memory. I never realized the terrain was the actual comanche terrain.

yep, thanks for all the hard work @ mefi

great interview

You got all of my wish list with 2 additions: * ability to favorite plugins (please!) * aliases on the arrange page

It's a marketing piece to highlight Imagination Technologies offerings. The title is misleading.

Sense | Boston/Cambridge, MA USA | Full-time | Onsite

Sense is a home energy monitor that lets homeowners understand their energy and know what's happening at home by showing them what devices are on in their house and how much energy each device uses in real-time. It's a simple box that is installed in your electric panel and a smartphone app.

We are an early-stage company of about 15 people, VC backed, and ready to grow the team! We are currently hiring for:

  * Product / UX Designer 
  * Data Scientist / Machine Learning Engineer
  * Marketing & Support Interns

Just tried it - few obvious ones on first open:

* Clicking on unstaged/staged files changes the diff view but the highlight on the file works on only half of the files, seems to be random when it works and doesn't work

* Highlight to show which branch is selected is gone (History is selected by default and highlighted, when you click out highlight is gone forever)

* Sometimes diffs are completely blank (https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/29857/194444/fU...)

* UI flickers, is about 2x as slow as previous version

Don't mean to pick apart a free product, but this is a tool we have been using for years and to have a pushed update regress things this much is a surprise.

I don't know why they have not pulled the new version yet.. apart from the login issue that blocked most people from using the app, there are so many regressions and new bugs it is unusable.

I'm surprised to see such a big misstep from Atlassian.

Sense | Electrical Engineer | Cambridge, MA | Onsite | Full-time

Sense is looking for electrical engineers and sr software engineers to join the team. At Sense, we are developing a consumer product consisting of hardware and software for analyzing home energy consumption at a detailed level. The insights and data provided by Sense help consumers see what is going on in their homes to save energy and make things work better. Sense is conveniently located near Boston in the heart of Cambridge, Harvard Square.

- Electrical Engineer - https://goo.gl/jNkBC5

Sense | Electrical Engineer | Cambridge, MA | Onsite | Full-time

Sense is looking for electrical engineers and sr software engineers to join the team. At Sense, we are developing a consumer product consisting of hardware and software for analyzing home energy consumption at a detailed level. The insights and data provided by Sense help consumers see what is going on in their homes to save energy and make things work better. Sense is conveniently located near Boston in the heart of Cambridge, Harvard Square.

- Electrical Engineer - https://goo.gl/jNkBC5

Agree this would be the idiomatic java way to do it.

I would greatly prefer this approach - it is clear, consistent with common java practices, and self-documenting: you don't even really need to know java to understand what this does.

Yeah sorry - should have said that above applies to digital audio streamed over a wire and decoded directly (spdif, aes, etc)

You can always use a $6k rubidium clock http://www.antelopeaudio.com/en/products/10m-atomic-clock if you really want to make sure your bits are synchronized. It's good enough for wu-tang!

For buffered data being sent and decoded, like via ethernet, the bits are the same on both ends, so I'm not sure what effect you would even make up to say it could change the output.

Poor quality or really long connections can cause jitter, especially since in most consumer stuff the clock is sent with the signal. That jitter can cause differences in the signal out from the d/a. That said, the difference is less than minuscule, and time and time again people post double blind tests that prove even people who consider themselves trained audiophiles can't tell the difference. Same goes for analog - in practice the cable doesn't make an audible difference, no matter what you use (see below)

Short answer: cables don't matter

The famous audioholics coat hanger test: http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/speakers-when-i...

Also a great watch: http://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml

Fantastic work. Thoughtful solutions to some real usability issues on the current site.

“At the time, getting a seed round done for a consumer Internet startup in Boston was a lot harder than getting a round done here,” she said.

I think this is still a big factor. Things have gotten a lot better - there is more of an ecosystem now, better availability of seed funding, and there is a growing pool of talent.

That said, beyond small seed checks investors in Boston are more conservative, valuations are lower, there is less appetite for risky consumer plays ("why don't you go after this known b2b market?".)

One argument for one language everywhere is the benefits you get from an "isomorphic" app (http://nerds.airbnb.com/isomorphic-javascript-future-web-app...)

Sharing code between client and server lets reduce duplication and use the same templating/rendering on both sides. Fits very well with complex single-page apps.

That said, I'm not sure there are that many apps that really need this vs. the tradeoffs you have to make going all-in on JS and the complexity this can bring.

This very likely uses network speech recognition, so most things (except for the wake-up word) are being streamed up and recognized in Amazon's data center (Siri, SVoice, etc all do this also)

I think part of the reason that most apps don't use these techniques is that there are not enough examples.

The examples that are available on SO, the apple docs, and IB generated/influenced code work great for the simple case but fall down a bit when your app grows. there are much better and simpler ways to handle some of the common patterns in large apps, for example the great thin view controllers article.

Objc.io is a fantastic resource.

agree - you are one of the reasons mefi is what it is. thanks for all of your hard work.