I'm surprised you can find a mid century PBX in a junk yard, and that if you could the parts wouldn't be completely destroyed by the elements. Is there some kind of indoor tech junkyard somewhere?
RE-PC in Seattle is like an indoor tech junkyard.
Readit Newsperplexes commented on 1980s Amiga has been running the AC and heat in 19 schools for 30 years geek.com/news/commodore-a... · Posted by u/flippyhead
perplexes commented on Inside Blue Apron’s Meal Kit Machine bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
I saw Good Eggs on Nextdoor and learned a little bit about you guys there. I think I'll definitely check out the service. One thing I'd like to know is the average calorie count of the meals in the dinner kits. I couldn't find any information about this. I like my dinners to be on the higher-calorie side - anywhere in the general range of 700-1000. If you guys hit that consistently, then the dinner service would be pretty awesome for me.
That's a great question. We haven't done the calorie calculations yet but they're full of healthy fats. Each meal is about three servings, if that helps any.
perplexes commented on Inside Blue Apron’s Meal Kit Machine bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
perplexes commented on Inside Blue Apron’s Meal Kit Machine bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
I think assuming people will have a base set of ingredients (i.e. olive oil like you said) is a great idea.
It's probably a good idea too to offer these ingredients through your service as an upcharge. "Buy your kitchen starter pack".
For meal kit customers who may not have the time or knowledge to stock the basics, this could be a win-win.
Oh, totally - it's one of the very next things we're implementing (personalization/recommendation, etc)
perplexes commented on Inside Blue Apron’s Meal Kit Machine bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
I work for Good Eggs. If you you live in the greater bay area want a dinner kit with local ingredients and focus on minimizing waste and packaging...
https://www.goodeggs.com/sfbay/dinner-kits
We use produce and groceries we were already selling as parts of our kits, as well as partially prepared food we prep/cook in-house. 80% of what we sell is made within 200 miles of SF.
We also assume you have things like olive oil. Hah.
Also worth mentioning is that we hold onto produce for usually less than 24 hours from the farm to your door.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Good-Eggs-hatches-ne...
Let me know if you'd like a beta invite to try the kits out. (Or to talk Operations Engineering (my team), it's fascinating and full of classic compsci problems)
perplexes commented on An Interesting SETI Candidate in Hercules centauri-dreams.org/?p=36... · Posted by u/phreeza
Is there a recording of the signal available anywhere?
perplexes commented on Writing a video chat application from the ground up, part 1 bengarney.com/2016/06/25/... · Posted by u/kimburgess
> you can break audio codecs by guessing which quantizer was used by the packet, then using it in reverse to produce speech!
Could you explain that using different words?
Here's the paper - https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf
This is a variant of "should you compress or encrypt first?"
Compression relies on pattern matching, and compressed size will leak details about what you compressed, even if that result is encrypted. (Unless you then pad the encrypted size, but then what was the point of compressing? I can see some more or less secure ways to do this like establishing a compression ratio/bandwidth/entropy limit, then padding and achieving that constraint so each encrypted payload looks more or less the same, but latency sensitivity makes this difficult)
In the case of VOIP, the codec uses a lookup table for distinct parts of speech (tch, sp, buh, etc). Then "all it has to send" is table cell numbers around (certainly not all). On the receiving side, you just look in your speech table and reconstruct.
These values have distinct output patterns, particularly when compressed. If you can guess better than 70% of the time (I forget the exact number they achieved) what table value was used, then reconstruct it, you can listen in on what they're saying, without having to break the underlying encryption.
Voice codecs are also awful at encoding music which may explain why when you're on hold, the hold music may just be dropped and replaced with white noise because it's reached some bandwidth cap. C.f. video encoding and falling snow.
perplexes commented on Writing a video chat application from the ground up, part 1 bengarney.com/2016/06/25/... · Posted by u/kimburgess
This is wonderful. I read the whole series in one sitting. It actually made video codecs feel way more approachable, rather than some patented black box magic I'll never understand.
It also reminded me of a recent article talking about how you can break audio codecs by guessing which quantizer was used by the packet, then using it in reverse to produce speech! Which I suppose is obvious in retrospect, that lossy codecs are trying to compress data by making it perceptually similar, whatever the domain.
I also appreciated the ties to video game networking. Gaffer on Games has had a long-running series on designing multiplayer networking protocols with UDP and you two approach bit-shaving very similarly (unsurprisingly I suppose - it's a very specific process with its own tools).
Anyway, thank you! I learned a lot.