HN user
Neat to see a Rob Robinette article pop up here, his website is a fantastic resource for guitar amp work. His articles on Amp Startup and Troubleshooting were particularly helpful when I built a tube amp for the first time. I hadn't heard of using an incandescent bulb as a current limiter in startup before, I was glad to have additional options for trying to make the troubleshooting process a bit safer given the high voltage involved.
Yeah, Carrier has been making heat pumps for quite a while now. I'm not entirely sure when they were first introduced, but when I worked there a few years ago the heat pumps were far from a new addition to the product line.
George Gillard's PID document is circulated widely for teaching high school students about PID for the VEX Robotics Competition: https://smithcsrobot.weebly.com/uploads/6/0/9/5/60954939/pid... I'd also add a +1 to the suggestion of the Controls Engineering in FRC book, but the math in that book is significantly more complex than Gillard's guide.
Love to see this writeup, and that you're enjoying FTC! I spent a ton of my time in college leading a VEX U team, and it was a tough but incredibly rewarding experience. It's a lot of fun and made me a much better engineer. It's unfortunate that FIRST doesn't really have any collegiate programs (excluding the mentoring groups that some colleges have), but VEX U gives you a similar experience to FTC with the increased freedom in machining and such. I would highly recommend joining or starting a team if/when you go to college!
Neat to see this on HN! I'm in a couple of fifth-wave emo bands currently, and there's some incredible music being made in this genre right now. I'll second the recommendations above, and add: Saturdays at Your Place, Ben Quad, Summerbruise, Arm's Length, MooseCreek Park, and Home is Where. They've all put out incredible albums in the last year or so :)
I missed this comment before replying at the top level elsewhere, but yeah I would need some socks with 4 toe holes :)
A good case for toe socks here -- unfortunately I don't have the separated toes needed to wear them! I'm not entirely sure how common it is (I'm only aware of myself and my grandfather having this), but the webbing between some of my toes extends far up the toes, kind of like a duck's foot. Toe socks and those toe shoes are out, I'm afraid.
It's really neat to see some FRC code here, lots to be learned from student robotics competitions! Shameless plug: I work on [PROS](https://github.com/purduesigbots/pros), an open source programming environment for VEX. We've talked about adding coroutine support there, this article is an additional push for getting that done!
I got hired a few years ago by emailing a contact in a "who's hiring" post. Still working there, and it's a great job! A big step up from my previous role.
QMK support on a laptop's internal keyboard would be fantastic! I've gotten very used to my corne, and switching to using my laptop's keyboard on the rare occasions when I need to is a bit disorienting.
A huge +1 for this book: I spent a lot of time reading and re-reading this book while in university, both for classes and my time leading a robotics club.
It's neat to see this on the front page of HN -- I got the chance to take an Intro to Semiconductors class from the professor in the article a couple of years ago while getting my EE degree. Semiconductor design never really piqued my interest so I probably didn't get as much out of the class as I ought to have, but Lundstrom was clearly quite passionate about the subject and taught well. Looks like a neat program and it's one that I'm confident will have a lot of resources behind it.
https://jonathanbayless.com A pretty simple portfolio/SWE blog site with Jekyll/Github Pages
I've mostly seen Corne builds that match this description, but unfortunately they aren't very common. (https://www.reddit.com/r/mechmarket/comments/jyfrv2/ic_the_c...)
I'm disappointed in myself for being surprised by this article, you're exactly right about this being the norm for similar software. I've found Life360 to be a helpful free tool in many regards but as is so often the case, if you aren't paying for the product then you are the product.
I'm really glad that this article got posted, I've been experiencing the same symptoms intermittently with my MX ergo but they haven't been quite enough of a pain for me to remember to look into fixing it. I will be taking a look at this solution (and the WD-40 temp fix mentioned by jh37) here now!
Another aimless 24 year-old here, count me in!
I had the same experience interviewing this last month. A lot of companies that are remote during COVID that will pretend to be fully remote until an interview or two into the process.
That sounds like a likely pain point here to me too - I've settled on using a Logitech MX Ergo trackball sitting between the two halves of my split keyboard. No more stretching to move the mouse!
Fun timing on this post, I just started learning to use LMMS a couple days ago. It seems to be a pretty good piece of software even if there are some kinks to work out with the plugins.
Ran into issues with loading VST plugins, apparently their GUIs won't work when using multiple monitors on Linux. I have to go into the display settings and disable my second monitor before using any plugins, which is a pain.
Came across this on Reddit yesterday, was a fantastic read. Added The Sweatbox to my "to-watch" list as well, looking forward to it.
Seconded, bought a used Steelcase for only about $100 at the beginning of the pandemic. It has been worth every penny with working from home.
I appreciate your point about nothing ever being "100% due to human error", especially in regards to air travel. I recently read "The Design of Everyday Things", a book that devotes a lot of its time to discussing this same principle. We should blame the UX wherever possible before assigning any blame to the individual.
This looks like a perfect fit for my use case, just downloaded it! I'm using Foam instead of Obsidian but it looks like the GitJournal author is also targeting Foam support.
I'm consistently listening to the following podcasts and would highly recommend them:
The Bike Shed, Coding Blocks, and Soft Skills Engineering
And these others are tech related but not specific to software engineering:
Cortex and Linux Unplugged
A minor nit, the author references MX Linux as being the most popular Linux distribution currently when that is not truly the case. Yes, MX Linux receives the most page views on DistroWatch [1], but that does not directly correlate to actual users or downloads. I'm still looking for a clear set of data showing the market share of various Linux distributions, but everything I have found so far points to Ubuntu still being the most popular distro. MX Linux is growing in popularity, sure, but it's certainly not a runaway winner in the market.
I personally use VSCode as a text editor in the sense that you describe. I edit my notes in VSCode with Foam, a similar tool to Roam Research. Similarly my blog is based on Jekyll and Markdown files so I use VSCode to edit those markdown files when writing posts. There are definitely cases where I use VSCode as an IDE for other projects but it works well as a simple text editor too IMO.
C is also used a lot in embedded environments where the hardware won't support languages with a larger footprint. Quite common in my line of work.
I also found that blank keycaps improved my typing ability when I built an Ergodox clone. I agree that the blank keycaps played a role in reducing my desire to look at the keyboard, but I think the columnar layout of the Ergodox played a much bigger role in encouraging proper form. When each finger's keys are in a proper column it becomes more important to use the right finger to press a given key, IMO.
Took a look at link 2 in Firefox, both the inline and block equations render excellently. Great looking project!