TomVDB

18 ms·

181.
by TomVDB 5y ago
It looks interesting enough, but I see that it's AGPL 3.0 licensed. AFAIK, the perceived toxicity of that license makes it impossible for use in a commercial setting?
182.
by TomVDB 5y ago
When I’m given a resume with GitHub links, I jump at the opportunity to check them out. (It almost never happens.) You don’t?
183.
by TomVDB 5y ago
> If the value then drops 10x, you won’t get your property tax refunded. That's right. And why would it? But also: your example is imaginary. When was the last time that house values dropped 10x or even 5x? It's counterproducti
184.
by TomVDB 5y ago
> Where would they live? And how can they afford the $30k/yr property tax? With proposition 19, approved in last election, seniors can move to a different place and carry their original property taxes with them. https://b
185.
by TomVDB 5y ago
Not if the house gets sold by a kid after their parents died. At that point, the capital gains tax basis gets reset. In the current tax climate, we will never sell our houses. It's an amazing way to transfer wealth while avoid capital
186.
by TomVDB 5y ago
You can expect that the market cap will be at least the amount of cash they have, if it’s a profitable company. (This isn’t always the case, but it’s close.) The more cash they gather, the higher the lower bound of the share price.
187.
by TomVDB 5y ago
Company A has $X in revenue, $Y in profits, and $0 in cash. Company B has X revenue, Y in profits, and $1T in cash. Which of the two would fetch a higher price in an acquisition?
188.
by TomVDB 5y ago
> Nobody benefits from a company growing indefinite wealth without distributing it to actual people. Isn't this exactly what companies like Apple etc. are doing? As it accumulates wealth, the stock price (which is supposed to reflec
189.
by TomVDB 5y ago
> The same if you bring friends to some social event, you wouldn't bring them if you can't handle them and they can behave in public. No, this is not the same. You are legally responsible for the behavior of your dog.
190.
by TomVDB 5y ago
Your POV is one way of looking at it. Another one is that the companies that we work for make insane profits despite the sky high compensation. In isolation, without major legislation that depresses those profits too, it at least makes more
191.
by TomVDB 5y ago
Have you considered the possibility that there are those who were drawn to that screen, and making it do what they want, at very young age, and never lost that sense of wonder and accomplishment when it did? I do think that the sky high sal
192.
by TomVDB 5y ago
Same here. The machines were really good looking too.
193.
by TomVDB 5y ago
$0.10 for a gadget like that is huge. I work on the main chip of a gadget that cost thousands of dollars with high margins on the end product, and our customers don’t like it one bit when we require an additional external component that inc
194.
by TomVDB 5y ago
“The parts that don’t have a pin compatible substitute” is usually 80% of your total BOM cost. It’s not a helpful clarification. Let’s take something totally ordinary like an STM32 MCU, and let’s ignore for a moment that there are now some
195.
by TomVDB 5y ago
> Stuff gets obsoleted all the time, it doesn't take a chip shortage. This is just not true. But when it happens, there is usually an announcement well ahead of time (e.g. 1 year), as well as a last time buy option. Historically, th
196.
by TomVDB 5y ago
My 2018 Audi has the same braindead touchpad interface. It's completely unusable.
197.
by TomVDB 5y ago
Let's not forget impossibly advanced German car user interfaces, such as trackpad to gesture individual characters to spell a word!
198.
by TomVDB 5y ago
Is it useless for first graders to learn to read, because they won’t be able to understand James Joyce? Are students who design and launch cubestats wasting their time because they can’t possible compete with commercial satellites? You mana
199.
by TomVDB 5y ago
Someone making $1M is often part of the working wealthy. No amount of advise from financial professionals will help them avoid paying tax on things like salaries, RSUs etc.
200.
by TomVDB 5y ago
I’m always surprised when people shit on Siri. I use it all the time for simple commands, and it works pretty reliably. I’ve never used anything non-Apple nor have I used any non-phone voice assistant, so I’m not in a position to compare, b
201.
by TomVDB 6y ago
Are you against buying a license to unlock advanced software features as well, or do you have the same irrational belief that only products that include a HW component shouldn’t be allowed to charge for advanced features? Would you prefer i
202.
by TomVDB 6y ago
If you’re going to make that argument, you also have to consider the opposite possibility: I’ve worked on (non-medical) projects with public funding in the past. One can only hope that my experience wasn’t representative for the amount wast
203.
by TomVDB 6y ago
The article references mentions $100B over a period of 7 years, or $14B per year. That’s a decent chunk of money, but it’s important to put it in perspective. Pfizer alone spends around $10B per year on R&D. J&J: $12B. Merck: $13B.
204.
by TomVDB 6y ago
Having to pay more for product than what you’re willing to pay is exploitation.
205.
by TomVDB 6y ago
(Leaving aside that Tesla also actively prevents you from running your own software on its platform...) The whole focus on hardware is just bizarre. When you buy a piece of SW that has free features but requires a license key to unlock adva
206.
by TomVDB 6y ago
Is a “broken business model” one that requires you to pay for extra additional features? If Nvidia enabled all their professional features on all gaming SKUs, the only reason to buy a professional SKU would be additional memory. Today, they
207.
by TomVDB 6y ago
I honestly don't think opening up documentation would change a lot. The medium hard part of FPGA tooling is synthesis, and the truly hard part is high performance placement and routing with low run times. The competitive benefits of be
208.
by TomVDB 6y ago
OP wrote "a fairly local optimzation". Compared to what a placement algorithm must do for an FPGA, your example is still exactly that, and one that's relatively easy to get right with a few heuristics.
209.
by TomVDB 6y ago
Ergonomic table with tray, Sculpt keyboard, trackball. It all does wonders, but it’s not always enough.
210.
by TomVDB 6y ago
The Magic Wand is great to relieve the pain when the RSI in my shoulder flares up!

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