skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BOM generation is generally a module within CAD/EDA software. The BOM generator typically pulls information from the design files (eg. quantities, designators, component type, ...) and also has the ability to bring in information from an external database ( eg. suppliers, last price paid, ...)

The main value in a BOM generator is this ability to automatically collect information from the design files and, typically in-house, component databases, due to its integration. Any standalone web app would risk losing this valuable integration.

Note that the component databases are typically in-house, built up over the years, based on knowledge accumulated over many designs. Some engineers will even carry a personal database from job to job with them.

Rather than a BOM generator, I'd say a valuable product would be in a serious on-line database of electronic components. EDA manufacturers and component manufacturers have half baked efforts, but they all suffer from their being an attempt at customer lock-in rather than being a truly useful resource.

It'd be a huge job collating and maintaining such a database, but it could be quite lucrative, especially if it included a facility to link suppliers with customers. Think imdb, freedb or cddb, but for components instead of movies or songs. The entry for each component might include:

* Manufacturer's data

* Schematic symbols

* PCB footprints

* Parametric information

* A list of suppliers

* MOQ, lead time, price, ... for each supplier

* and so on...

You'd also need to be able to generate library data in various formats to suit each EDA/CAD tool, or provide an API through with EDA/CAD tools could issue queries on the fly.

It would also be a neat trick to integrate with some of the circuit layout website that are appearing, leaving open the possibility of building an EDA "design flow" by exchanging data between using a set of web sites.

---
CAD = Computer Aided Design

EDA = Electronic Design Automation
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You know you've been on SO too long when you see this title and go, "I'm pretty sure I know this question already." And you're right.
What you describe is basically how the alcohol industry has functioned in this country since the end of prohibition. All sales are forced to go through distributors who then sell to stores who then sell to consumers. There is no purpose for this other than another level of bureaucracy, waste, and limiting of competition.
> I knew you could theme on iphone, but I didn't realize there was more in the modding community for it than that.

I definitely have to throw together a video demonstrating various jailbreak tweaks. If I still had my 4S I would do it right now, but I'm waiting on the iOS 6.1 release to jailbreak my iPhone 5. I'll be sure to send you a link if you're still interested.

> The fact they assume that is sort of odd to a point, given how many in the Android community readily accept and mod phones without a complete source tree by Samsung, HTC and others in a similar fashion by reversing the dalvik byte code into Smali.

No doubt, I was astounded at how much I had to figure out and how many attempts I had to make to root an EVO 3D for a friend. And this was after someone had already made a handy tool for the process and spent months developing it.

All that just to take it past the awful stock HTC ROM Rogers left it on and to peel out the crapware. Jailbreaking, by contrast couldn't be simpler. However you can get away with a fair bit more on an unrooted Android device than you can with stock iOS so in reality it's just a tradeoff.

It's nice to see the phone market becoming a Windows/OS X/Linux situation though, where the differences aren't so drastic and what you use basically comes down to personal preference instead of any blatant advantages. Every time I have a chance to play around with a more recent Android device the experience has become better.
Don't keep us in suspense! What OS does the Tesla dashboard run?
> For instance, a "burning" desire may be sufficient to motivate a 22 year old to study mathematics, however that same desire in a 44 year old might not overcome the pressures, realities and obligations of life, work & family.

You'd be surprised at how many there are.

I'm mid-30s and I've recently finished a maths degree via distance learning (Open University in the UK). During the time I've been studying I've moved house, got married, had increased work pressures, become a father and I am helping bootstrap a startup in what little free time is left from all of that.

At the various tutorials, revision day schools and exams during my studies I met lots of others who were in similar positions. It's more common than you think.
Heh, I remember the "honors 5.0" thing being really hilarious in high school -- it actually penalized people for taking an extra language class (for which honors wasn't offered), so the valedictorian basically was the person who took all honors (there were a fair number) and took the absolute minimum of electives. I'm glad I dropped out :)
Great idea.

This will save the following thing happening again and again:

1. Someone asks me for a laptop recommendation.

2. I tell them "ThinkPad T-series" and state you can get them online for the price of a mid-range laptop in a retail outfit from http://www.lenovo.com/ with a direct link to the product page - they say thank you.

3. Some time passes

4. I get a call from the person saying they bought a "Lenovo" laptop at their local electrical supplier and it's rubbish and they'll never trust a recommendation from me again. They have inevitably bought a cheap Lenovo close-out machine which has died after 3 months (their cheap machines are crap).

5. Argument ensues and email is re-sent with "ThinkPad" highlighted. Much "aaaah" is to be had.

4 times so far. People just don't get the difference between good and crap, which is to be honest, where Apple are quite good.
This is an amazing talk by Tenenbaum. Thank you for posting it!

I'd really like to subscribe to your blog/site so I can read your more substantial set of writings as they appear -- but I can't seem to find the appropriate RSS or ATOM feed on your site. Am I missing something?
Arch is a maintenance nightmare if you want to be productive.
Seriously, another one?
> in mathematical writing, what is actually written is the tip of a gigantic iceberg of implied reasoning and background scenery

The programming equivalent of this as I see it is a program depending on lots of libraries encapsulating that "implied reasoning". And you can manage a program even with tens of millions of lines of code in libraries. And it doesn't make the program itself larger because that library code is reusable, you can also use it in other proofs. Yes, it's incredibly hard to manage such a code base, you also need extensive documentation, something like "literate programming" - but it's not intractable.

You would have to write a big part of mathematics as library code, probably a multi-decade length project - but the benefits seem huge! "Translating" mathematics in such a form could augment a mathematicians brainpower "manymany....manyfold" and could be just as important as, let's say, a cancer research project taking decades and tens of millions in funding, but it should worth it! Imagine that hundreds of "less talented" mathematicians could handle problems that only a handful of people can understand today (with the guidance of the "real geniuses", of course), revolutionizing many fields of science through the consequences of their results.

As an analogy, when people used roman numerals, only a handful of highly educated people could do complex calculations, but nowadays we all have more than basic arithmetic knowledge, thanks in large part to a "change of language". I think a "change of language" could really make mathematics a less "elite only" field (though I have greater hopes for letting "AI systems" give a helping hand than for letting "lesser mathematicians" do some of the work, in the end one can't predict what will make the most difference - hardware or wetware, it's still computing power, and, as the complicated software problems are solved, more and more of the computing power can translate into "mathematical reasoning power" I think).
I think the fact that you can already pretty much do this via a bluetooth headset or headphones, yet few do, speaks volumes about the social action of putting a phone to your head in public.

Not everything is a technology-related barrier. I suspect most people will be less inclined to look like they are talking to themselves than you would think.
i havent seen anyone mentioning things like http://xamarin.com/

Write your business logic in C# and just build the View for every platform with native components. Sounds like the ideal tradeoff for me!
IMO this is more like "My life with a tablet instead of a phone". Once pocketability, actually calling people and one-handed operation are no longer a concern to you then your options are basically limitless.

For me those are my top 3 concerns, but if they aren't for you then go for it. Keep in mind though, there is nothing remotely discreet about whipping out a tablet to check something. Not to mention trying to use it on a crowded subway/bus.
Great article.
I've made a chrome extension for making it easy to capture learning from internet and do spaced repetition. Check out http://memobutton.com
I've always wondered why they don't do more surgeries this way, an epidural without anesthesia.
Common Dilemmas Designers and Start-ups Face
Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a designer with a little bit of experience, it is very likely that you have run into troubles with the designer/start-up you decided to work with.
Yes and as I found, those annoying hipsters actually are quite rude, arrogant and unhelpful (Kingston Upon Thames Apple Store, Surrey, UK).

An hour to get replacement earphones for my daughter's iPod due to the well known problem of the rocker switch which failing after a week! I asked "so what happens when these fail? Do I have to spend an hour a week down here?". The reply was simply "it's not my problem".

She owns a Cowon now.
you meant "skilled" mathematicians... I hope :)
I have never used Arch, but I heard it uses rolling releases. Could you expand a bit more in the typical problems an Arch user would run into?
> ...to even killed mathematicians ...

I suspect you mean "skilled".

> They'd have spent a lot of time and effort to
> disprove a theorem that nobody was interested in.

Not to disprove the theorem, but to invalidate the proof. the conjecture would remain open.

> ... there are still people working on Ramanujan's
> conjectures that there may still be some worth to
> it ...

Ramanujan has a proven track record. Even when he first sent material to Hardy it was ignored, and it was only because some of it looked immediately plausible that he started to check. Every initial check proved correct, and so he continued, growing in his conviction that the author had something with reading.

In this case there is effectively nothing to suggest that this is worth reading.
Would a pregnant woman count as a single occupant of the car?
The second thing I thought after "loading..." was that it's a cross between the 80s United artists logo and the ugly two-color late 60s MGM lion:

it looks dated but not so dated as to be classy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnitedArtistsLogo1980s.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MGM_logo_used_in_the_movie...
> I had never tried emacs before and decided last week, ironically, to try it for the first time

The fact that Emacs and Vim lack features attractive to newcomers tells nothing about their value.
Musicians and Craftsmen invest years in learning their tools or instruments [1]. One is left to wonder what a Guitar or a Saxophone would be like, if the concern of the designers were ease of use for someone who picked it up the first time. A famous quote comes to mind [2]:

A computer is like a violin. You can image a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

Marvin Minsky, "Why Programming Is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly-Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas"

I further refer you to fine writing of Eric Naggum [3] who had more to say on a similar topic, and I daresay he does it way better than I ever would.

[1] http://norvig.com/21-days.html

[2] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/front/node3.html

[3] http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3065048088243385@naggum....
Good question! I assumed that I would remember if it happened, also I did not have any nightmares involving doctors or hospital.

On a separate note it was weird watching youtube video of someone else's appendectomy knowing that all of that was done to me too. You know it's like watching someone eating lemon. :)
Run with the pack and eventually become de-marginalized on the slippery platform being controlled by Apple, or work a bit harder and gain traction on every platform you can. This has always been a strategic decision for developers, large and small groups, and both paths have their merits and pitfalls. Neither is a guarantee of success.

Also, its not as hard to "keep the compatability layer" up to date as you state .. you need to do it anyway, if you use the vendor-provided native tools. If you can do that, you can take it one step further, and maintain a very productive outer-shell over the trap-tools. That can be a very good strategy, or a poor one; all the examples you provide may be the larger failure cases, but there are smaller success cases underlooked in your argument .. MOAI, Love2D, GamePlay .. these are all coming along to eat the Native Development Devotee's lunch ..
I am sorry, there was no 'hubris' at all. You obviously misunderstood my comment along with other few not very bright people. Recently I had to conduct a number of job interviews on C/C++, and then I came across this article, and a thought came to my mind that great people cannot be measured with a scale of mediocrity, and that the mainstream in every field of human knowledge is used to be very focused on non-essential detail. Sapienti sat, but in your case it is the reversal.
I don't wanted to say that it should make 125k a year to make it valuable. But the ratio has to make sense. Just compare to the Sortfolio Sale: 120k rev/year sold for around $450k, makes far more sense. (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2899-sortfolio-deserves-a-bet...)
I feel like the real barrier is less technology and more social attitudes. I rarely see people using Bluetooth headsets in public, the vast majority still hold their phones to their ears when receiving a call and only use headsets in their home or car, if ever. Also, attempting to discreetly text with something that gigantic is difficult if not impossible.

That combined with how slow battery technology evolves makes me assume vast majority will be using phones as phones for the next couple decades. There has always been a niche for VoIP/SIP/Text based solutions to allow you to use other devices as phones, but I don't see any indication that it's about to break out of a niche into the mainstream.

The same people willing to experiment with this sort of thing are the same people that were willing to do so 3-4 years ago. Tech enthusiasts. Everyone else seems to be maintaining the status quo, and barring an unforeseen shift in social attitudes I don't see that changing any time soon.
I've got a 10 year old T-series (Think its a T21) in the cupboard. It did 7 years service for the original user for 4-5 hours a day. It was dropped and bashed around regularly.

I only keep it because it has a real serial and parallel port but its still going strong!
Russian startup to release a smartphone with e-ink display on the back [video]
I always ask myself why I'm thinking about these things in the first place. Its a failure of the language, in my opinion, a deep design flaw that isn't being recognized.

Why do things need to be synthesized in this day and age. I know why technologically, but it doesn't have any actual use in real life. Its just window dressing and something special the developer needs to think about, with no real solid gain other than to entrench a platform-specific methodology into the language, and thus ensure developer mindshare is captured and maintained ..
> the public is being harmed.

Maybe the should look in the mirror?
Right, you know exactly where everything is when it's your own messy room, but if an outsider wanders in, he can't tell the bed from the curtains.

I grant that there is sometimes a necessary tradeoff between power/abstraction and readability, but readability is still extremely important, and you can't just handwave away confusing language constructs and documentation with "it's obvious after you code in the language for a couple years". Simplicity and intuitiveness are powerful features in themselves.
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Does Java do coroutines/green threads? No. At a deep architectural level, the segmented stack required to do green threads is what sets Go apart. And if it wasn't for this, Go could have just been another JVM language probably. I guess they felt this was important enough to justify building their own runtime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation
"But the starting point, it seems to me, made sense."

It doesn't make sense to me. This could be handled with contracts, not laws. When signing a franchise with a factory, you stipulate that they can't enter your market or otherwise infringe on your territory by doing ___________.

It's a perfectly fine contract clause that unnecessarily turned into a law.
God the Pacific Sun is such a piece of shit publication. I wonder if they still bother distributing free newspapers because most people in Marin wouldn't take one if they got paid for it.
Yeah I definitely don't agree with it - and in Tesla's case since there were no franchises it isn't even relevant. This was an obvious case of the current car companies fearing competition.

The current car franchise system sucks (which Tesla is acutely aware of) and with selling something new requires a good team to do it.

I have an example first hand when I went to check out the Volt after it first launched. I kept hearing the advertising saying its 'range' which confused me since I thought the gas generator could power the electric motor after the batteries were exhausted and you could just refill the gas. I started thinking maybe the gas generator could only extend the range or something (the internet wasn't clear since things were new).

When I went to the Chevy dealers they were worse than useless, they knew nothing about the volts they had and what they did tell me ended up being wrong. It turned out the advertised range was just terrible marketing.
Every time I use a giant-screened Android device I have this feeling. Even now that I'm used to the operation of one, I still feel like I can move so much faster with one hand on an iPhone. Like I can't help myself from bringing up my other hand for something I would do with one hand on an iPhone. Bulky cases also tend to exacerbate the situation.

Kinda like the App Switcher, it's something iOS & the iPhone get a ton of shit for, but in practice I'm so much slower at one-handed navigation without it. That could also be because I'm a lefty, though.
Also, he basically destroyed the Ents. That was my favorite part of the book ("You have angered an elder power. The elder power hits you. You die.")

Instead we get Treebeard being basically a dummy sidekick for the hobbits, who realises late that Saruman is destroying the trees and then goes on a rampage.
-- why vim.

Don't want to create a flame thread, but I felt the urge to reply.

I was really skeptical of vim as an editor just like you are, until I (and I am so glad I did) forced myself to use vim for a month for ALL my text editing. The linux kernel is old, does that make it less useful? That's not a valid argument at all.

It certainly takes some time to learn how to do things, macros, search and replace, move blocks of text, install some good plugins, etc... All of this is incredibly fast and ergonomic as opposed to move your right hand to the arrow keys every now and then. Textmate, Gedit, Redcar, pretty much other text editor has just a subset of features that vim has (emacs being the exception where vim might be a subset of emacs). Learning vim is just like learning a sort of new way of talking to your editor. ":wq" is obvious once you learn the words. It means write and quit.
Another big advantage I see is I can work remotely through SSH and be instantly super productive with an editor that doesn't get in my way. I learnt vim before doing this, now I pretty much do all my coding on remote machines where using Textmate would simply be losing a lot of time after a few days.

It is not a replacement for IntelliJ Idea, Eclipse, Visual Studio, or any IDE. IDE's help you in a different way that sometimes can be more valuable than having a powerful tool to edit code. Programming JavaEE apps for instance is something I just find way easier to do with an IDE.

I agree, the user has to put a lot of effort to be able to understand and make vim work for him as an amazing editor. Spending time learning how to use a computer program is something we are not used to do these days but in the case of vim it pays off.

--- OP

Back to the original topic, I agree opening the results on a web browser sort of defeats the point for me as well. If you can find a way to render the articles and comments texts nicely in a terminal I would find it a lot more useful though. Maybe you can reuse the parsing work the fellows at Pulse.me have done, I can't find the feed if there's any though :( . Best of luck!
I believe there are two failures here: one is design. The other is communication.

It's fair to argue that the design/branding was better or worse. I happen to think the new logo looked insipid. The rest of the branding seems to stand up better.

However I think we all should agree that the communication regarding the branding was a travesty. This doesn't seem to be the designer's fault, but they're catching most of the blame.

What I don't like about the original article is the "your opinion is wrong and here's why" attitude. Telling people that they are wrong up front is another communication failure.
Yup. I've got a W520 at work and its absolutely amazing. Fast, decent screen and even with a quad core i7 has decent battery life and even when being taxed is cool enough on the underside to use directly on my lap.
I'm puzzled by this comment. Arch values elegance, code correctness, and minimalism. Initially Arch installs a very minimal base system, and package management is done via rolling release.

Perhaps you should explain exactly how Arch is a "maintenance nightmare."
The Statistics Software Signal and what your statistical software says about you
Yeah, agreed. Or some other kind of crystallized rock. Very abundant in sands...and Mars is sandy.
Both SL and R-series have been discontinued for more than two generations already. The current ThinkPad series aimed at small businesses are the ThinkPad Edge (E-series) and L-series, the second one of them isn't supposedly that bad. You are also forgetting the W-series, which is the most expensive and which came from the T-series performance models aimed as an portable workstation. Besides that, R-series weren't bad at all, the latest generations were pretty much the same as T-series.
I was surprised to see the answer to this question in the CHP car pool FAQ:

http://www.chp.ca.gov/html/answers.html