HN user

DanGPhoton

34 karma

New technology, middlebrow computing

Posts0
Comments15
View on HN
No posts found.

I would like to think that in 10 years I'll be buying a used 64-qubit card on Ebay, like a 2GB video card. What will be the equivalent to gaming which drives this tech to ever-higher performance? DIY protein folding life hacking?

Anyone here ever try ironCAD? I've thought about buying a personal license of a professional CAD package. Solidworks (my most familiar) is too expensive for personal use. OnShape I'd consider if I could sign up month-by-month and go dormant. But I'd like an old-school software package that I could keep indefinitely but knew it could do all my entry-level work.

Something similar happened with my alma mater (Franklin & Marshall College) when an Italian designer gave a clothing line the same name. Students started coming home from travel abroad with tales of bootleg college gear. IIRC the college and clothing company worked out some licensing deal.

Funny, I agree with the structure of what his argument and the limitations of Matlab but disagree with the pedagogical conclusions. I learned to drive on automatic transmission cars, and found it a good stepping-stone to learning how to use a manual transmission. I just had to buy a cheap used car to make it happen. Likewise, I started coding seriously using Matlab (well, IDL even before that.) I'm slowly transitioning to Python and (command line) Julia, I think this would be much more frustrating if it weren't for the experience with Matlab. Even reading the occasional block of C code is easier after the Matlab experience.

FreeCAD has some advanced capabilities but is not a great package to start on. I've created some weird shapes in it but would never have been able to do it if it were not for a fair amount of SolidWorks experience. You might try using OnShape, where everything is stored in the cloud. I haven't tried it yet but it seems to be made by the same people who did SolidWorks. They probably have good tutorials. If you get over a learning curve there you might be better prepared to do things on FreeCad offline.