iqster

Serious question .. are you long on cash or what? What investment class is not overvalued? Gold is but a store of value and doesn't really grow - look at how high it has gone.

Check our code.org. It feels backwards but I am very impressed. Move onto sphero , then micro-bit and then arduino. There are also decent systems called scratch jr and scratch. Finally, I can’t recommend LEGO mindstorms and boost enough.

Btw this article was an interesting read on trying to build a modern ventilator: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/car-manufacturers-ventilator...

War time devices must be simpler (easy to make and do field repairs on). We just need the first one.

The key insight that made me want to post this is we should actively try to move to an older ventilator design (does bulk of the work, not optimized but easier and simpler). I have encountered this in my life as a software engineer. MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) in the mid 90s was hard to grok .. you had this huge book by Jeff Prosise to absorb. I cracked it when I chanced upon a manual for MFC 1.0. It was super simple and down to the essentials. All the fancy stuff they added from 1.0 to 5.0 was icing and made things complex.

I think people who are actually working on ventilators should seriously consider going for a simpler design .. it might be this or might be something else. The person in this article also said he is happy to give the design away.

I think if the Malaria Med+Antibiotics treatment from the French study don't work (we'll know in about a week I think), we need to move to a war footing and start producing ventilators. My back of the envelope math has scared the crap out of me (best case 500K Canadians dead, worse case 3 million).

I really hope someone who can make a difference sees this.

My captcha was too obtuse ;-) Please check the email again.

Thank you for the links. I work in this space professionally. I had heard about Brillo and Android Things a while back (there was very little info back then). Looks like there is a lot more good info now. Will delve into it. By the way, if you are in Mountain View and want to grab coffee, please reach out (email in HN profile).

I have fond memories of Chuck at MSR-SVC. I was a lowly post-doc who sat close to him for a time. He was very generous with his time and I can only recall his door being open. I was struck by the breadth of his expertise (e.g. he knew about HCI matters even though I considered him a low-level systems guy). I've heard him being called the engineer's engineer and that is an apt title. He inspired me and will be missed. RIP.

Hi! Yes .. the PhD requirement is only for the researcher position. A Masters or equivalent hands-on systems experience is sufficient for the dev position.

P.S. Pls see my email address from my HN profile. Thanks!!

Samsung Research America | Systems Research Engineer | Mountain View, CA | Onsite, Fulltime | http://www.sra.samsung.com/job/view/288901

We're a group of scientists and engineers who are building fault tolerant, distributed systems. Members of the group have published at top conferences such as OSDI, NSDI, FAST, MobiSys, Middleware, etc. We are currently hiring hands-on systems researchers as well as people with strong software development skills in Python, Java, C, or C++. If you are very comfy with coding for Android or Linux, do mention that. Also, if you have coded against a DB like MySQL, Riak, Cassandra, or a pub/sub system, bonus points! The right candidate must be comfy with concurrency primitives (have used locks, critical sections in practice and understand the implications thereof) and network programming. We don't carry pagers or have on-call - the work is more about coming up with compelling ideas and creating proof of concept demos/prototypes to illustrate them. This is a very unique opportunity for a serious developer who is interested in getting exposure to a research lab setting. The company offers lots of perks. Please mention you saw the post on HN.

P.S. My first "Who Is Hiring" post. Please be gentle :)

Wow .. seems there are more people in the intersection of SVLUG and HN than I thought :-)

Heh .. me too! I did it as a hobby project over the holidays. Loads of fun. A few people suggested I write up my experience. Ended up giving a paper at Sci Py 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d8d_3-8ae4

You can use a search engine to find the paper if you are interested.

Hi HN,

Over the past several months, I've had the honor of working with an amazing set of people to build this service. Would love it for people to try it out, and give feedback.

I know there are videos and press releases coming out. Also, since we are just releasing the service, there might be a queue for access. You can take a look at the CLI docs until you get access. Thought the dev community would like to see more detail :)

Neat. How does the hovering work? Is that also using capacitive sensing?

Thanks. Where do I issue vagrant halt (i.e. which folder)? The workaround I found was to go virtualbox directly and issue a poweroff. Not clean at all :(

How do you turn off the VM that is hosting the dockers? I.e. when none are running?

Btw, I found the vagrant documentation for the docker provider to be a bit lacking. I probably wasted a day getting it to work :(

In deep tech, no.

I got me a C6100 a while ago (Is this what you got?). The price on the C6100s has doubled since a lot of people realized these were good, cheap machines. What did you get (and curious for how much?)

Didn't find an affordable place to host it so running it at home. Got a small soundproof rack and static IP address. Some issues but learned a lot doing the exercise.

Can I get anything like this with a more common tech stack? I.e. Node JS, Java + NIO, Python + Twisted (or something else)? 10K, I get. But 1 million+ is freakin awesome in my books.

I'm seriously thinking about Erlang now. What raised my eyebrows was "2-3 million concurrent connections on a single FreeBSD box"[this is what WhatsApp achieved]. Async network IO can be done with library support in Python, natively in nodeJS, etc. I wonder if one can push those stacks to this level.

Here ya go:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/12/duckduckgo-used-...

Tip from experience: Really think about logistics before diving in. Racks (even quarter racks) are heavy!! Data center equipment is also noisy. You eventually also hit limits on household electric circuits. It is fun though :)

I have lots of respect for the founder. One of his blog posts motivated me to buy my own rack + datacenter class equipment. So much fun!!

Someone made a robot that played Angry Birds: https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/presentation/470/

I was wondering if this would work for Flappy birds. Due to the speed of the game, I think it is going to be quite a challenge.

P.S. If you are interested in the mindstorms robot part, I'll put a shameless plug for a robot I built some time ago (based on some work by David Singleton). Code is on github but here is a pycon video: http://pyvideo.org/video/1195/self-driving-lego-mindstorms-r...

Details??

- Stamford resident

I lived in the bay area for a while and moved away. I went to the meetups and didn't get it initially. I used to joke that every person, including their dog, has a lil startup. After a while, I started to "get" the extreme optimism, ideals, etc. Don't get me wrong ... there is a TON of B.S. and lots of posers who end up getting successful. But it is a neat feeling to meet your tech heroes in person, and perhaps get a chance to work with them.

I do think SV is a special place and, if you are in tech, you should experience it at least once. I like to say "Silicon Valley is a state of mind". Once you get it, I think you can live anywhere with the same mindset. Certainly, you don't need to live in the valley to get "it" but it sure helps.

I was fortunate to have dinner with him once when he visited our University (sadly, this was close to the time of his death). He was a pretty sweet old man. I recall he was very humble and a vegetarian. I had no clue he was so accomplished until I took a graph theory course in grad school!

I think this is an important issue. I didn't think about fumes when I got the printer. Someone who sat next to me started getting headaches. Also, another colleague was concerned about the effect of burning ABS on reproductive health (she pointed me at a study which I don't have a pointer to now). To run these devices in a corporate environment, it isn't enough that I be satisfied with a scientific paper (rightly so .. I'm a computer scientist and this is not my expertise).

Edit: Thank you for the link. It helps to educate myself on the topic!

One thing that should be noted is the burning smell of ABS plastic. I got a 3D printer in my office that is currently serving as a paperweight on my desk. That is until I get access to a lab with an exhaust hood.

All my previous experiences with 3D printers had been in outdoor/well ventilated environments so this issue hasn't come up. I'm surprised how little people have talked about this.

Would you be willing to do a short post-mortem write up on the load challenges your site faced? Since you are part of the HN crowd, I imagine you did all the reasonable things and somethings still surprised you :)

I was one of the participants and I had a great time. I'm probably a bit of a hackathon junkie. I judge my involvement in such events based on a few metrics. Did I learn something new? Did I have a good time? Was I able to get something working in time for the demo? I was satisfied on all three counts.

My project, along with I think 3 others, touched on map visualization. In the past, I've used Google Maps and Google Earth to do geographical visualization. However, I recently "discovered" SVG and ended up writing a visualizer from scratch. Basically, I started with an SVG map from wikipedia and added hover, and coloring capabilities to it. As I was writing this code, I kept wishing I had jQuery like support ... which led me to discover Raphael.js and jquerysvg :)

Going into the event, I was a bit nervous. However, by hour 2, I was pretty comfortable. People were helping each other and sharing their code. I'm not a big Github user. When I ran into a problem, it was kinda cool that I was able to go over to Scott Chacon (he helped figure out the problem in under a minute).

One of my criteria for a successful hackathon is that I can show a respectable demo. In this regard, I could have done better. As others have noted, we did have access to the API for a week. However, since I was busy at work on a project (which, incidently, we are demoing in Vegas tomorrow), I definitely had less than a week. I was impressed with pretty much every demo. What is noteworthy is that most people presented their projects. At the average hackathon I go to, it is probably 50%. It was also nice not seeing start-up pitches being disguised as hackathon presentations. My project could have been better - but whatever - I stood up and presented and that matters to me. I think some participants might have used my code, which made me really happy :)

May I suggest you take a look at Make: Electronics, Making things talk, and Making things see. The Make folks also have a set of smaller books: Getting Started With Arduino, Getting Started with Processing, etc. These books are written in a very accessible manner (though not necessarily comprehensive).