xja

It's really a shame that VCs don't seem to have figured out how to do DD on science based startups.

The same is probably somewhat true in tech generally, but VCs in this area don't seem capable of doing the DD. They invest based on personality, connection or business background.

That's all great, but really what these early stage companies need is a CEO with a strong scientific background and focus.

In my experience, those CEOs often don't come across as strong enough to investors who are generally more comfortable investing in tech, which is easier for them to understand.

So my hope is that high profile failures make VCs wake up, and assess scientific startups differently. However I think it's more likely that they'll just avoid them all together.

Neat! I wonder why they're not part of kernel release tests.

That statement really resonated with me.

So often something happens which seems like a total disaster, the end of the world, and you struggle desperately to fix it.

In hindsight it turns out it didn't matter as much as you thought it did anyway. Has happened in so many startups I've worked at.

The article mentions microcontrollers that use 100 milliwatts as the lower end of embedded CPUs.

There are actually microcontrollers that use around 1milliwatt for very low power applications. For example the msp430. TI have a neat video of one running using power generated from grapes:

https://youtu.be/nPZISRQAQpw

As far as I can tell it appears to be a classic use of an uninitialized pointer.

Are there not static analysis tools routinely used against Linux that should have caught this?

Or runtime memory access detection, like valgrind.

I know both might be slow on a project the size the Linux kernel, but it seems worth it.

It feels like failures on the scale of Segway are now pretty run of the mill. They "only" raised a 166MUSD [1]. Doesn't really compare to modern failures like Theranos, 686MUSD.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/segway#/entity

[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/theranos#/entity

RISC-V really seems to be gaining momentum with 2 crowdfunded silicon implementations currently seeking funding:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/onchip/open-v

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1

Looking forward to a future where CPUs that are open hardware, from the transistor up are generally available.

Currently returning:

Resource Limit Is Reached

The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.

The irony! Cache link:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ei=h0J3WMKKA4er...

I've been reading Cryptonomicon recently. There's an entertaining bit where one of the characters asserts that beards are "totems of the white male patriarchal privilege".

It's a bit silly. But it is interesting to note that every bearded person mentioned in this article is white.

Amusing and depressing, awesome stuff.

Git's rise to become the de facto standard revision control system has been fascinating to watch.

I think it does provided real benefit over Subversion, but there are also smaller projects where the gain is marginal.

The tooling around (in particular GitHub) and perception that git is the "right" way to do things probably helped it achieve prominence. As well as early adoption by a few high profile projects.

In formlab's case they had a 1.8MUSD seed round prior to the crowdfunding. They raised ~3MUSD from crowdfunding.

This probably helped give them some runway to put together a series A. However they still raised an additional 50MUSD.

So, I don't think they're a great example of a company bootstrapping from crowdfunding. It's more of a traditional play, with some validation (and some runway) from crowdfunding.

Pretty terrifying. I'd love to see a more detailed analysis of the datasets they received. It sounds like both governmental and private surveillance systems in China may be pretty leaky.

I wonder if the information is leaked through hacks or compromised individuals.

The author is essentially saying any API change has the potential to break backward compatibility and that we should define what kind of breakage is ok.

That's kind of interesting, and I'd not considered many of the scenarios mentioned (which apply beyond go).

Perhaps the "correct", but cumbersome thing to do is supply different versions of the API when maintaining backward compatibility and never change the old version.

It's strange how the fact that it has an easily rememberable IP address has driven adoption of 8.8.8.8. I have a couple of other DNS servers memorized from before 8.8.8.8 appeared, I'd likely switch to them.

I guess the predictable would happen. Badly configured systems would stop working. Systems with a working secondary DNS would keep working.

More interesting question is what could you do if 8.8.8.8 was compromised? That could be interesting.

Which is why I said potential rather than actual. Having users terminate their connection at Cloudflare always adds an extra layer, and a dependency on a US corporation and therefore subject to the US legal system.

It's not totally ideal. But I'm glad to hear you're trying your best.

To be frank I think that's a bit naive.

These attacks are a numbers game. There's a low cost to sending the emails and a much larger payoff.

Education helps, but it's still possible to catch people off guard, tired, new users etc.

Anything that can be done to flag these emails as spam, or increase the cost to the attacker helps.

I was think more of a specific mail scanning process for images that look exactly like UI elements, with some fuzzy match.

If it matches, flag it with the usual warnings.

It feels like there's at least the potential to explore options.

That's a real shame. There are certainly things they could do to prevent images looking quite so similar to UI elements.

The how to link in the description doesn't seem to be working but it's here:

https://www.hackster.io/mathwuy/elite-dangerous-ship-assista...

Neat hack! It's awesome that Amazon have opened there API to the degree that you can implement these kinds of things. Hope Siri does the same someday (though I think it's unlikely).

Looks really cool and must have been a fun project.

I guess it's not hugely practical, partically as each Pi has a display attached.

Mythic beasts in the UK are doing Pi based co-location. I think this could be interesting. Not perhaps in terms of performance, but the isolation between users in nice.

See here: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi

Cloudflare's own statement also on HN here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13372729

Adds more color to this. In any case, it's great that the EFF and Cloudflare have been fighting this.

Wow hugely interesting, including that Capitol Hill staff felt NSLs could not be issued against Cloudflare, when they were.

One question I have, they chose to voluntarily redact the customers account name in question for obvious reasons. But have they now informed the customer directly?

In any case, thanks Cloudflare for fighting this. I often feel a bit bad about using Cloudflare for my blog, as it exposes users to a potential layer of tracking. This makes me feel a little better.

It's a shame this person didn't get to phone screen. I found the phone screens quite fun, particularly if you're are not too worried about concerned about getting the job.

People seem to view Google as some kind of tech Nivana. I'm not sure that's really true, though there are awesome people there and interesting things to do.

There seems to be plenty of bad managers too from the stories I've heard. For me it would be an interesting place to work for a couple of years before moving on to something else.

I guess it really depends.

On projects where the level of commenting is low and theirs little to no documentation it can be tough.

For C projects as there's usually a single point of entry I just start with main() and read through the code to get a conceptual overview of what's happening. Often I find it useful to comment the code/write basic documentation as I go.

Then I often attempt small changes/refactoring to attempt to validate my understanding. Often I'll add code to dump intermediate data to better understand what's happening.

It can be quite a slow process in a large project to be honest, and it's a lot easier if you have the original developer available to ask questions.

Debian bootstrapping is awesome and surprisingly easy to use. I've used it in the past to bring up a Debian install in a chroot on various otherwise unsupported devices (mostly Android watches and phones).

This is true, but I'd guess that having a nice Mac Pro isn't going to gain them market share. The market they're losing is probably the low end (where cost difference is higher).

Does this really matter?

I've also felt that recent mac desktop/laptop releases have been poor. But is it really important to satisfy the masses in this market? It seems like we're in a world where most people could be quite happy with doing most things on a phone or tablet.

That's not to say it isn't likely an important strategic market (after all it's the only platform you can develop iOS apps on). But having a large share of this market might not be important.

Here's the original CCC talk:

https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8069-tapping_into_the_core

Yahoo Japan is a separate entity. Yahoo (Altaba) is a minority shareholder (35.5%).

Of course, the Yahoo brand in general has value elsewhere too, but I don't think this meaning Yahoo Japan will be rebranding.

Pretty interesting, I'd never taken the time to review the React license.

In addition to this restriction, my guess is it will cause other undesirable license compatibility issues.