bff

7 ms·

1.
Show HN: Owl Platform - Wireless sensing with a 10 year battery life(owlplatform.com)
2 points by bff 13y ago|0 comments
2.
by bff 14y ago
Smart and automated homes are closely related to my research so I'll chime in on this. Even though the technology exists to do lots of cool things no one has built a modular system that you can mix and match pieces to. Right now each "smart
3.
by bff 15y ago
You can always use the slackware-current packages to run with software that is newer than the last release.
4.
by bff 15y ago
Campaign money also comes from people though, so if enough people care about an issue then even politicians who only care about raising money will respond. A quick google search shows that a large amount of Obama's money comes from individu
5.
by bff 15y ago
The software process that develops the applications are very different. An avionics system must be able to operate autonomously, must have robust fault detection and tolerance, and must interact directly with many hardware components. Web a
6.
by bff 15y ago
Not really - a lot of the technology that NASA builds ends up being used in other areas, from materials science to computer engineering.
7.
by bff 15y ago
Don't get too excited just yet - actually putting a sensor on everything would cost a huge amount of money and anything besides a passive RFID tag or barcode would need a battery. Consumers would need to pay an extra few dollars for everyth
8.
by bff 15y ago
"Evidence-based" means that you tie statistical outcomes to procedures as apposed to doing what you think might be right based on your limited life experience (which is biased). For example, let's say there is a test that checks for a birth
9.
by bff 15y ago
It's probably easier to use that much less power for the same performance than to push the same power in and get higher performance. On smaller size scales power leakage and heat dissipation become bigger issues so you might not be able to
10.
by bff 16y ago
I feel compelled to disagree with people who insult C++ for the fun of it. In response to what you said, the STL is optimized and fast. You shouldn't be using that many smart pointers because allocating memory on the heap is usually not the
11.
by bff 16y ago
Return types can't always be deduced since they can be ambiguous - imagine an if statement where one branch returns a float and the other returns a double. The desired return type could really be any numeric value since the types can be con
12.
by bff 16y ago
I thought the same thing when I starting working with the new standard, but I've really grown to enjoy a lot of the new features, specifically the new pointer types, rvalue references, initializer lists, variadic templates, and better suppo
13.
by bff 16y ago
I've been using them for a while now (gcc has support) and they're not awkward. The ability to specify scope is actually rather nice and most of the time you'll either leave the scope empty with [] or pass everything in by value [=] or refe
14.
by bff 16y ago
What would stop special interests from buying a new candidate every cycle? They help the candidate get elected, the candidate crafts legislation to the special interests' benefit, then the special interest hires them as a lobbyist when thei
15.
by bff 16y ago
I much prefer Zeno's Republic, where everyone is equal but strives to be wise. Really, I think that there is no such thing as a perfect government, only a perfect citizenry, because the power of a government is always derived from the peopl
16.
by bff 16y ago
This is actually an active research area so a google scholar search can turn up interesting stuff from various security conferences. Here's a summary of what I've read and heard about: If a chip has unecrypted personal data stored on it an
17.
by bff 16y ago
Rutgers Winlab is has also been testing a sensor based approach to detecting open parking spots. They're using a sensor on the car to detect open spaces and measure their sizes to see if they're suitable as parking spots. The professor lead
18.
by bff 16y ago
For that range it's probably using active tags, which is why they cost so much. On the other hand passive readers often cost a few thousand dollars and have tiny ranges so I think that active systems end up being cheaper in many deployments
19.
by bff 17y ago
Another thing left out is solder flux. Some surfaces might be too small or too hard to reach and heat with the iron so I put flux onto the surface first and it causes the solder to flow into that area more easily. For instance, if you want
20.
by bff 17y ago
I've heard arguments to the contrary, for example that deflation encourages people to invest their money under their mattresses. If money you hoard loses value then you feel a stronger need to invest it, which is better for the economy as a
21.
by bff 17y ago
The value being passed in java is the value of the pointer, where the original pointer value cannot be changed by the function. This is pass-by-reference. Think of pass-by-reference as a special case of pass by value where the value of the
22.
by bff 17y ago
There is a precise term for that and you said it - pass-by-value. Recall that somewhere each language turns into assembly and that in order to pass a value to a subroutine you must either place values into registers or push the data of the