Hacker News: stephenmm

New comment by stephenmm in "Openbot: Turning Smartphones into Robots"

stephenmm — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 13:54:57 +0000

There is, sort of. There are many people/services that will print these parts for you.

New comment by stephenmm in "Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm"

stephenmm — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 18:41:10 +0000

The executives and board members are not delusional. According to legal precedent set by Dodge v. Ford Motor Co, a 1919 decision that held that "A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes..." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

BTW, I agree with you that it is gross but thems the rules. So if we extend this logic we need to convince the corporation that it is not in there financial interest to continue with the status-quo.

New comment by stephenmm in "Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm"

stephenmm — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 17:53:52 +0000

To me this is exactly the problem of our times and should not be trivialized. Were there too few gatekeepers of news in the past? Maybe, but the "new" problem is that it has become too efficient (IMO) to spread misinformation while peoples ability and tolerance to spend time on researching the facts has diminished. To say it another way, misinformation/obfuscation/misdirection are not new but the scale of it is and it is critical for us to come up with better solutions to deal with it than we have today. Our climate and our democracies depend on it.

New comment by stephenmm in "Programmers can’t write algorithms without help"

stephenmm — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 17:28:27 +0000

I was a little skeptical of take home coding exams but the more interviewing I do it seems to be a pretty efficient way to screen candidates as it is less stressful than live coding and more realistic "simulation" of the work they will do. It also allows you to deep dive into their thought process without having to worry about semicolons.

A persons ability to think through a problem and communicate it clearly will get them 75% through the hiring process in my books. (Another ~10% is curiosity).

New comment by stephenmm in "Show HN: Dark Reader extension – Dark mode for every website"

stephenmm — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 21:30:38 +0000

Yah I am sure hardcore hackers are giving up the gig b/c they need a PHOTO of an ID! And now the ones who are legitimate have to trust a company with their IDs? This seems like a VERY weak stop-gap measure to a very difficult problem.

New comment by stephenmm in "Oberon System Implemented on a Low-Cost FPGA Board (2015) [pdf]"

stephenmm — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 14:22:55 +0000

He calls it RISC5, one might assume but does anyone know if it is using the RISC-V ISA?

New comment by stephenmm in "A study of musical scales (2017)"

stephenmm — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 14:44:48 +0000

Nice work! If I could make one suggestion it would be to use hex instead of decimal. It would make the numbers easier to remember (shorter) and I think it would be easier to recognize patterns (Ie. whole scale is 0x333 and major scale 0xAB3).

New comment by stephenmm in "The U.S. is risking an academic brain drain"

stephenmm — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 16:37:14 +0000

Agreed. My neighbor (a Mexican national in the U.S.) who has successfully started many companies is looking for a place in Canada this week. His moving will be a great loss to the U.S. economy and innovation.

New comment by stephenmm in "Program FPGAs with Go"

stephenmm — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 00:26:49 +0000

Actually there is already a Scala version that is well defined. From the website https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/ 'Chisel is an open-source hardware construction language developed at UC Berkeley that supports advanced hardware design using highly parameterized generators and layered domain-specific hardware languages.'

Not sure why they wouldn't use it instead.

New comment by stephenmm in "RISC-V port accepted for inclusion in GCC"

stephenmm — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 17:04:47 +0000

Not sure but I bet that ARM is starting to pay it some attention!

The great thing about being open is it allows academics and inventors to try out new ideas and have the ISA and associated "backend" flows just work without the worry of having to pay for licenses.

New comment by stephenmm in "Time-saving technology destroys our productivity"

stephenmm — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 19:59:33 +0000

I could retire today and be very comfortable for the remainder of my days (I am 41) but man would life get boring. Even if I work on projects I haven't had time for and travelled to places I wanted to go there is still something about working day in and day out, with a sense of urgency and with a group of people to make something greater than you could do on your own that leads to a sense of purpose. I also think that if you are spending that much time covering your arse you are working for the wrong company. You should revel in doing quality work not in covering your arse.

New comment by stephenmm in "Advancing our amazing bet"

stephenmm — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 16:24:24 +0000

I live in Austin and they literally just yesterday marked up my yard where the fiber is supposed to go. Does anyone know if they will finish the job or am I left out to dry here?

New comment by stephenmm in "Shenzhen I/O"

stephenmm — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 16:23:27 +0000

Looks interesting but its not clear to me what it is... Anyone have more noob friendly introduction?

New comment by stephenmm in "BeagleBone Black Wireless"

stephenmm — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 22:18:52 +0000

I like to see this stuff (seems like they should have had this earlier) but to me the real market shifting is less about performance and much more about preformance/watt and unit pricing. If you can push the boundaries on those two areas and still make it easy to hack then I think you have something that could push innovation to a new level. Still it is great to see this!

New comment by stephenmm in "Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration"

stephenmm — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 16:49:22 +0000

Would be neat to give it real topo maps and then have it generate the towns and see how well it matches reality. Great work!

New comment by stephenmm in "How Intel missed the smartphone market"

stephenmm — Mon, 16 May 2016 17:17:15 +0000

They did adopt ARM earlier than most and had a license for it that would allow them to even make innovations of the ARM core like many of the current successful chip developers but they were not able to create great comms chips like they were able to do with PC chips. I believe this was due to there culture more than anything.

New comment by stephenmm in "How Intel missed the smartphone market"

stephenmm — Mon, 16 May 2016 17:06:29 +0000

They made several attempts (http://www.cnet.com/news/intel-sells-off-communications-chip...) but I think Intel has a huge cultural problem that does not allow for true innovation outside of core competencies. I worked for the Marvell group and while Intel did not know how to be nimble Marvell had there own issues which is in part (IMHO) why blackberry lost its leadership position. But the biggest problem with Intel is the culture as you are truly just a cog in the wheel there. Just my $.02

New comment by stephenmm in "Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source"

stephenmm — Tue, 10 May 2016 17:57:38 +0000

If this works well than this indeed is a HUGE reason to use BK!

New comment by stephenmm in "NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell"

stephenmm — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 23:13:31 +0000

The new name has to be dcbash or maybe dcsh but dcbash is more fun.

New comment by stephenmm in "Go IDE in a Docker container"

stephenmm — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 13:46:21 +0000

I like the idea. I wonder how much the Google Cloud Platform is costing him?