trapperkeeper79's comments

Heh .. my fav book in the discworld series is Going Postal, and its sequel. I highly recommend them.

I've read a few of Taleb's other books. He seems to have a few brilliant points with lots of supporting materials and rants. Can you summarize the new insights you got after being married/employed?

This is hilarious. Given that the world's population is 7 billion today, we started with (7x2) people 600 years ago? LOL. Doesn't check out.

A correction to what you said: Bill C-6 (which undoes the damage done by the conservatives) has been stuck in the senate for many months. I followed it closely, and it was a bit disheartening. Checkout the forums of the website canadavisa.com to see people's frustrations.

I'm a Canadian and I am very worried about the future of our country. Due to various factors, new laws affecting large swathes of the population can get effected very quickly. What starts off as reasonable laws can get co-opted into something very crazy (any student of history should know this well). I echo the concern made by a few others that we are one election away from craziness. Not sure how things are going to go at this point. As a visible minority, I am scared.

RE HDR ... I saw a side-by-side setup recently and could not tell the difference. I think you can only tell the difference if you turn the brightness way up. Or maybe it is just me.

Haha .. I really wanted to pick up an active shutter system to play with. The price had kept me away. I was hoping that eventually the prices would come down.

As an aside, it seems 3D projectors are still around. A friend showed me his setup just the other day.

What is the status of NaCl? Is the project under active dev?

Is there a way to chroot the linux distro? I'd love to be able to have multiple systems (even if I could only have 1 active at a time). It would be great for experimentation ala VMs.

I'm curious what the state of the art in rule engines is? I feel this is a neglected topic these days. I'm almost surprised to see new work on the topic.

The "connecting two ethernet MACs [with] filtering" seems like an interesting project. I guess a "simple" (and possibly useless) idea could be to do filtering based on MAC addresses in the enthernet frame. Is there open IP for this? I guess I'm asking how a hobbyist gets into this :-) If anyone knows of an existing project, I'd appreciate a pointer.

The iFixit was very interesting. It has a freakin FPGA?? A comment said it was there to drive the e-ink display, while the MCU slept. Any confirmation on that? Also, what the heck was the smart strap supposed to be?

This is sad because I was just about to get a Pebble (had tried beefier watches but felt battery life was too limited).

I saw the page via wayback machine since the site was down at the time. Seems like a cool academic project. I've been getting into FPGAs personally, with this exact application in mind.

I've been really stymied by how to process packets in hardware. The obvious approach seems to be to run an RTOS or even full-fledged linux if your FPGA has hard IP cores on it. But is there a better way? How much performance would one lose? I'm also a bit confused about how to communicate on PCI-Express (I'm a software guy ... so learning about DMA). I have seen soft IP for TCP/IP stacks but it seems too crazy. I'm doing this as a hobby education project btw. It has been great fun so far! Wish there were meetups on this topic.

I agree. I've been impressed by his selection in previous years. This year seems drab with the exception of The Grid. Also, doesn't he read fiction? My fav book of the year was Ready Player One :)

Pardon me, what videos?

I'm a dabbler and I came across a very cool project that seemed a bit out of my league at the moment - but perhaps you and others on this thread will get a kick out of:

https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-ll-003-build-a-small-radar...

Basically, making your own radar system with Coffee cans. As a newbie, I'm a bit surprised by all the modular components that were just fitted together. I knew about Amps and attenuators but didn't know you could get VCOs and mixers like that too. Any books/website recommendations/beginner projects would be appreciated!

HP Spectre (the one before the latest once since the latest doesn't have a regular HDMI connector). It is pretty decent .. the only con is the trackpad. I fooled around with the settings to make it livable and also use it with an external keyboard and mouse when I'm coding at home. The windows subsystem for linux is pretty rad.

I've been delving into VLSI but realize it is quite a complex topic. Can anyone familiar with this provide a TLDR? Is the idea here that instead of verilog, etc. one can use python to code a PLD/FPGA?

I bought a Windows laptop this year after being a long time Mac user. I still have Macs in the house, and use a beefy 15 inch Macbook Pro for work. I'm pleasantly surprised by my Win 10 experience. It isn't as polished as a Mac but hey .. I have touchscreen, new processor, lots of ports (which I care about) and almost half the price of an entry level Macbook pro. The cost isn't a big factor .. I would have loved to buy an expensive Macbook with beefy hw specs. What is being sold right now isn't for me.

Some people believe central banks are essentially printing money right now (since 2008, so for nearly a decade). Why has inflation not picked up?

Agreed. The question is what does a young person do? Take on an asset that is known to be overvalued or wait for the rate climate to change.

As a data point, condos in Toronto (condos in Toronto are generally tiny and not the most desirable place to raise 2 kids) appreciated by 9-10% this year despite continuous bubble talk by various levels of govt. You and I both know this will not stop until rates rise; and they won't - at least in canada - because of a significant problems in the oil sector of our economy. Is the right thing to do to buy into this "ponzi" scheme and try to time the exit? Or continue to hold the course of staying out of it and waiting for rates to rise. I have rented since 2008 when I graduated and I'm tired of shoveling my money into the fire :'(