Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | jetpacktuxedo's commentslogin

> A clarification: these are interviews with people who assemble custom keyboards, I was expecting chats with the people who actually design and produce custom keyboards (like yuktsi, Rama, Wilba, ZealPC, etc...)

At least one of them is with a board designer, the V4N4G0N one with Evan (formerly of TheVan Keyboards)


No, you can't pay your ISP to get "faster internet", only to get more bandwidth between your wall and whatever backhaul provider owns the physical fiber lines. There is no way to make the internet "faster" other than reducing the number of hops you have to make to get to the destination, or by increasing the speed of packets on the networks, which should already be roughly speed of light. Therefore if they are proposing "fast lanes" it isn't about speeding you up, but rather about slowing everyone else down.

Net Neutrality doesn't prevent ISPs from selling more bandwidth to netflix, it only prevents ISPs from treating the traffic differently due to the identity of either the sender or the receiver. This means that Comcast can't slow your traffic down just because you are sending data to and receiving data from netflix instead of using Hulu (which they partially own).


The article states, "All internet service offered in Washington would have to be free from blocking or throttling of legal online content. Nor could it be subject to a system of premium-priced “fast lanes” that offer better bandwidth to content providers that pay extra for the privilege."

So, the law does prevent ISPs from offering "faster" internet, however you define it. I still don't see the distinction between allowing consumers to pay for faster internet, but prohibiting content providers from doing the same thing. I pay more for 250 mbps. Why can't Comcast offer Netflix additional speed for more money, which would be illegal under this law? As I understand it, slowing down your competitors is already illegal under the FTC rules.


I think that "fast lanes" are about (say) Netflix paying for more downstream bandwidth.


That is not entirely correct. One can sort packets by their type and make sure those that require expedient delivery (VOIP calls, streamed video, gaming calls) get out first. Smart profiling at this level would certainly speed up the overall experience; some consumer-grade routers have settings exactly for this kind of thing. It's not much different that different kind of mail handled by postal services. And while postal services probably cannot easily speed up the average delivery time for all their mail, they can certainly deliver certain mail much faster than the rest of it. For a price.


I agree with you for the most part, but it's a bit disingenuous to interpret "Faster Internet" as just referring to latency, people are almost always talking about bandwidth + latency when using that term (really just how long files/webpages take to download on average - which equates to that).


Them competing to be the safest means that none of them are as safe as they could be working together, though.

If every company has their own secret suite of test cases then different companies can specialize in different aspects of safety, and different AIs will be tuned to watch for different conditions.

Imagine if instead of that they all worked together to define a rigorous test suite. Then they would all be striving to excel against all of the tests that the best of them could come up with. Wouldn't that result in more rigorous testing than any individual company would do? Especially if the results of all of the tests were public?

To go another step further, imagine an open carAI platform that had the aforementioned test suite and a full simulation platform for testing changes, with different car manufacturers represented on a committee that oversees the carAI platform. Separate the smarts from the base car a bit and have some sort of abstraction layer between the smart bits and the car bits. As long as the abstraction layer is configured properly then different AIs would be interchangeable/upgradeable on the same base hardware. All car companies (and tech companies, and interested individuals) could collaborate on building the best, most efficient, safest car AI possible. People on older hardware would get all the same safety improvements as people on newer hardware (though hardware improvements would obviously improve things like sensor quality and quantity and the like), there wouldn't be fragmentation between ai ecosystems with poorer people trapped on older releases with lower safety standards while the rich get the latests and greatest and safest cars, etc.

Obviously competition is better than nothing, but is it really better than an open, collaborative alternative?


I agree, I also think this self driving component should be standardized, maybe more then one standard but you should be able when you buy the car to decide if you want the AI or not, and if you want it to chose the AI package from company X,Y or Z.

Maybe making the component open source would be the best for the citizens.


Yes, competition is better than collaboration. Collaboration gets bogged down in committees, with each shareholder trying to protect their turf. Competition leads to improvements as companies try to find an edge/advantage over their competitors.


I mean it isn't like any of these makers are sharing their tax returns or anything, but for example eat_the_food is the designer and manufacturer behind "Nightcaps" [0]. He ran an event called "Poisoned summer" where he had 80 days of "micro batch" sales, where each sale was for somewhere between one and fifteen or so caps, priced between $60-80 each. Most days the sale was only open for about one minute, and in that minute he would have hundreds of entries to randomly draw "winners" from, and then the winners would get to buy the keycaps. I'm pretty sure he hit six figures in sales on those 80 days of sales alone, and those were not his only sales throughout the year. He isn't even making keycaps full-time yet, he still has a day job.

Several other members of the mechanical keyboard community (especially in the artisan keycap subsection of the community) have managed to turn their keyboard hobby into a full-time job and make a pretty decent living out of it.

[0] https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79513.0


Probably not particularly well as the Myo band only detects a handful of super basic gestures, and unless they have changed their stance in the past year or two they refuse to expose the raw data to developers. This makes it impossible to distinguish more than their predefined gestures.


I get this in dense areas now. I will still get "in a half mile turn left on X street", but when it actually gives me "turn left" I will instead get "take the next left" or "take the second left" if there are multiple streets close together on the left.


When I was less used to using it, it would say "in 1500 feet turn" and then there would be a turn right there, and I'd think that was it, but it wasn't. I had to start gauging how far they meant by it. It does say "second turn" but only when the roads are very close. It would be better if it just always used that instead of these absolute numbers.


>you can dial a phone from Hangouts, but not back

I use google voice and hangouts. I can both send and receive voice calls using my google voice number via hangouts. I can also send and receive sms message using my google voice number via hangouts. Both of these have been true for at least 4 years, maybe 5. They started trying to phase sms out of hangouts a few years back, but never removed it for google voice users.


Out of curiosity, did you see it in 3D? Most of my friends that saw it in 3D were complaining about how bad the renderd Leia and Tarkin were, but very few of my friends who saw it in 2D had any complaints about it.


>I get it completely. It's nowhere near as done up as say, Seattle or Boston. It's because it has an industrial past.

Seattle also has an industrial past, and more importantly, a lot of it is still industrial. If you pop open google maps and zoom in on Seattle's waterfront, essentially everything south of Yesler Way is shipping and other industrial uses. Additionally basically everything south of the stadiums is pretty industrial, even further inland.

From looking at Toronto, it looks like the Port Lands area you are talking about is pretty similar to the Sodo area in Seattle I was talking about, while your Harbourfront Centre and Bathurst Quay are more like what people usually consider the Seattle waterfront, with lots of parks and some restaurants, near what I can only assume is your downtown area?

The biggest difference that I see is that you guys appear to have a _lot_ of parking lots, and your rail lines and a big expressway appear to run right between your downtown and the waterfront.


You've got me there. I've only been to Seattle once and was promptly exposed to the lively harbour area as that's where we arrived by ferry from Victoria. I mean, there's a ferris wheel! And it was night so it was all lit up. Toronto has some nice features, for sure... maybe it was only the difference.

The Gardiner Expressway is a notorious design flaw with criticisms spanning decades -- people just rely on it too much now to change it. Though it's now crumbling and needs repair, there are some propositions for beautifying that area.

The rail lines have been there for a very long time, though in different spirit, maybe.

This whole conversation has reminded me I haven't spent much time down around certain parts of the waterfront in a long time. The expressway is a major psychological block for a lot of people. It makes it seem so far away. In seattle it felt like a short walk from halfway up downtown because of the features all along the walk. Walking beneath the Gardiner here is not a thrilling experience for a downtown. That's one difference I can note for sure, if we're to compare properly comparative regions of the cities.


Not sure about low latency (especially since this article seems to have failed to test that at all...), but for low-profile cherry-style switches you could look into the new low-profile Kailh switches, which are sort of based on the old Cherry ML switches. The only manufactured board you can buy with these right now is the Havit HV-KB390L[1], as far as I know.

If you are really tied to the cherry mx style you could check out the kailh and cherry "speed" switches, which have slightly shorter travel distance and a higher actuation point.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mechanical-Keyboard-Extra-Thin-Switch...


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: