electic's comments

electic | 7 years ago | on: Build a do-it-yourself home air purifier for about $25

Woah, this is pretty scary. Thank you for sharing. How did you know it was mold that was in the air? Is there some sort of test kit that you can buy to test for this. Mold is pretty hard to detect because you can't really see it because it typically hides between the walls.

Any advice appreciated.

electic | 7 years ago | on: VSCode silently opts you in to data collection

I guess this might be a precursor to the type of behavior we can expect to see with the GitHub acquisition.

Secondly, is there anyone out there that has a solid emacs step by step guide that might be able to replicate the functionality of vscode? I haven't had time to look at it but I think the time has come where I can't put it off any longer.

electic | 7 years ago | on: Time Magazine Sold to Marc Benioff for $190M

I think it will be quit the opposite. It will be run like the Washington Post and it will free them up to actually focus on making great content vs. making spammy content to drive clicks and sell magazines.

electic | 7 years ago | on: Apple Goes Vertical and Why It Matters

What I am stating is that the definition of being vertically integrated has changed. The OP is arguing it is bad because of the history of capital costs associated with manufacturing.

It is not longer cost prohibitive to be vertically integrated because you don't have the upfront capital costs of manufacturing. With that, Apple is excelling at what they are doing. AMD is excelling at it as well. Historically, this type of behavior would be risky if not foolish.

electic | 7 years ago | on: Apple Goes Vertical and Why It Matters

Apple doesn't make their own hardware. What they do is design their own hardware and chips. I agree with you that if they actually made their chips this would be bad.

Case in point, you can see Intel really struggling because not only do they design their own hardware but they also make it quite literally with their own fabs. This has resulted in a lot of delays moving to 10nm and beyond.

AMD on the other hand spun out their fabs and now use fabs around the world to handle the actual manufacturing. This frees them up to actually design hardware and innovate at a much greater clip. Heh, they are even going to 7nm.

The same applies with Apple. It is quite cheap to be vertically integrated because you simply don't really have to make anything. The capital investment is quite low. It is something that Sun didn't have the luxury of.

electic | 7 years ago | on: Silicon Valley is changing, and its lead over other tech hubs narrowing

You're kidding? There is more and more rhetoric being spewed relating to the legal kind as well. There is even policy being enacted to drastically cut down or make it very hard to gain legal status by burying you with paperwork.

Beyond immigration talk, the constant spewing of racism coming from the administrations is a clear signal that immigrants of different backgrounds are not wanted.

To that end, they simply pack up and build their business and wealth elsewhere. We won't feel those effects right now but it will hit hard in a few years.

electic | 7 years ago | on: A majority of US teens are taking steps to limit smartphone and social media use

I am not surprised. One thing that I have noticed about myself is I ask myself after a session on Instagram, "What did I get from that?" and the answer is usually nothing. Did it help my career? No. Did it make me smarter? No. Did it help me make friends? No.

It didn't improve my life in any way.

The instant I asked and answered that a few times, I started cutting down my usage dramatically.

electic | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: Coin Registry

Hi HNers,

It's been awhile since we posted here about our release of CoinHub[1] and everyone gave some amazing feedback. Since then, we’ve expanded to build our own data network because we grew frustrated with the lack of real-time pricing, news, and social posts. Most of the stuff out there is polled and could be up to 15 minutes late. So we’ve launched Blockmodo[2].

One thing that we had a huge issue with is keeping track with all the coins that are in the market. We decided to open source our entire token database:

https://github.com/Blockmodo/coin_registry

We’ve spent hundreds of hours curating information on hundreds of coins and we wanted the process to be a community process going forward. Let us know what you think!

- Blockmodo Team

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15403495 (New Version Soon)

[2] https://www.blockmodo.com

electic | 7 years ago | on: Keyboard Service Program for MacBook and MacBook Pro

The problem is that this service will mean sending in the computer because the keyboard is not easy to replace on this model. I've heard from techs they just end up replacing the whole thing.

Does anyone know if the keyboard they plan to replace it with is better? Or is it the exact same keyboard that will end up sticking again after a month?

electic | 8 years ago | on: Facebook's Mandatory Anti-Malware Scan Is Invasive and Lacks Transparency

To the common person, what you have outlined is rocket science. You have to remember that most people are not as advanced in computers as you are. What Facebook is doing here is wrong. They are actively indexing files on people's machines and sending that data back to Facebook and their partners. This is a gross invasion of privacy.

Another reason not to use Facebook.

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