readingnews

"I keep coming back to this topic for two reasons. First, I think these components are usually explained poorly, making them a major stumbling block for folks trying to learn the craft. Second, op-amps have gotten really good, inexpensive, and small, so I think they should be used more."

No offense, but these are words typically spoken by someone who has never taken any electrical engineering courses or read any of Walter Jungs books, after having some electronics background.

"gotten really good"? Really, like in the 1970s?? (the 741, still widely used today was released in 1968). I recall in the 1980s in the electronics that were once completely discrete, they were _everywhere_ and still are today.

Totally agree, I went to fiber years ago, and the decrease in latency makes it _feel_ so much faster than 10G copper, it is not funny. Besides, if you put in the "good stuff" them moving to 40G and beyond is not a problem later on. Like others said, just add a copper line for POE devices, but for systems... its fiber all the way.

The real problem is his example, "you start off with 2 million dollars and 95% growth rate".

Fine, show me the average person who can come up with 2 million dollars. I sure as hell can not. I even went to banks and founders with my ideas, cash flow sheets and customer list looking for a loan.

No, I am convinced, the rich already have 2 million dollars, and make themselves a billionaire. The system is rigged against "normal" people.

Dropped in to say this. The Marzoccos are good, but dang the Kees van der Westen are downright amazing... I know a lot of cafe owners who threw the Marzocco out and purchased a Kees and the espresso shot quality went through the roof.

On the flip side, a really good bag, and these have lasted so long I can not recall when I purchased them, are really expensive [https://www.tombihn.com/].

What is really irritating is that sometimes we see the same thing within a single brand (we have a garbage entry-level item and a top tier item which is good).

Completely agree with this comment. Had to cut / paste it into vim and q! when done, was getting a headache.

Not sure if they were the first, or whatever, but this really seems like a breakthrough technology / methodology. How many cardboard boxes do we use a day? The mind boggles.

Totally cool stuff.

I thought your blog sofware was interesting, and you have a blog on it from last year. The Git link on this page: https://elliotbonneville.com/building-a-blog-in-90-minutes/ however, is broken.

Broken Git link: https://github.com/elliotbonneville/elliotbonneville.com

Heh, I made myself laugh.

Literally clicked on that link thinking I had read _asteroids_, as in a remake of the 1979 game.

Total disappointment ensued.

I will admit, I type exclusively on 40% keyboards. I used to have a Happy Hacking Keyboard, (in fact, the original Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB) with separate PS/2, Sun and ADB cables, still have the board and cables), then the HHKB USB, then the HHKB 2. One day I saw a 40%, in fact an original "minivan" by "The Van Keyboards" and thought I would give it a shot. For someone who uses the computer all day, this was an advancement over the HHKB in the same way the HHKB was an advancement over the 104:

* Your hands move a lot less during typing.

* Your hand is much (_much_) closer to the mouse to grab it.

Even though there is a slight learning curve using layers, after a short while it becomes just like the muscle reflex for "hit shift to use the alphanumerics", etc. When I have to run into the data center or go somewhere and use a "real" keyboard for a moment, I am reminded of just what a huge time difference it is to grab the mouse, or reach for keys like PGUP/PGDWN, etc. It may not be for everyone, but I advocate for giving small keyboards (even split ones) a try.

I worked at 5 universities, two of them in the top 50, and I do not know of one tenured professor that "does nothing" and "publishes next to nothing". Some of them teach very little, and that may have been for the best, but all tenured professors I was aware of needed to do research, bring in money (or you were, yes that's right, fired), and teach.

Granted, I worked in STEM fields. Maybe this author does not realize what it is like in the physical sciences or engineering?

I have an old HP 15C RPN scientific calculator.

- I know where the buttons are without looking.

- It has functions my Android calculator does not have (directly or that I know of).

- It has a strange satisfying tactile feedback.

- It never interrupts me. Ever.

- It never distracts me. Ever.

I reach for it frequently.

Not sure why you have to read 3/4 of the article to get to a _link_ to a pdf which _only_ has the _abstract_ of the actual paper:

N. Benjamin Murphy and Kenneth M. Golden* (golden@math.utah.edu), University of Utah, Department of Mathematics, 155 S 1400 E, Rm. 233, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090. Random Matrices, Spectral Measures, and Composite Media.

Thanks for the links, that is a company I did not know existed, and the woofers are interesting. Really makes you wonder if they have overcome the traditional problems of large woofers. The Fostex super woofer users recommended rotating it once a year due to its own weight possibly deforming the spider structure of the woofer, at only 27" across. 60" or 100" across is back to the future level ridiculous. As another poster said, I can not see this outperforming several smaller units, but I would love to see/hear it in action.

Unpopular opinion: What does this have to to with hacker news, technology, computers, combinatorics??

It is hard to put into words how so many people "out there" can print things, have people read them, and they are so worded that the average person is probably reading this as "the truth".

but it’s rather difficult to build a good analog oscillator from scratch. The most common category of oscillators you can find on the internet are circuits that simply don’t work. This is followed by approaches that require exotic components, such as center-tapped inductors or incandescent lightbulbs.

It is not hard to build a good analog oscillator from scratch, we have been doing this for decades. Secondly, while an incandescent _might_ be considered exotic, and completely unnecessary for an oscillator, a center tapped inductor is totally not exotic, and also, not really necessary for an oscillator.

As others have noted, it is simple to build a really good analog oscillator. This article is blah, and "meh" at best.

Wow, I read your informative link. Where are these jobs? I went through a round of interviews last year for Sr. positions, across a number of locations in the U.S., and quite frankly, the average salary for the positions interviewed for was $80k less than most of those in the list, and $230k less than the SWE manager in the list.

I have indeed lived life wrong. I work in HPC as a Systems Engineer (right now, in 2025, with graduate degrees in engineering, and 25 years of systems admin / engineering experience) and do not make what this person made in 2017, much less in 2025, OR 2-5x that amount for that matter (total dream salary, geez)... at one time I was the data center manager and teaching CS classes, at the same time, working 80 hours a week.

How the heck do these people secure these high paying jobs? There is some club, and I am not in it. Sorry to rant, but that 1FTE salary is huge.

"Graduate degrees" listed as a reason.

Yes, designing chips is hard, it takes a lot of knowledge. This is why medical doctors need to go through all that schooling... designing a tiny chip with more transistors running software that does amazing things is very difficult.

My Ph.D. is in computer engineering, specifically VLSI and chip design. This was from a few years ago. I _probably_ should have gone into industry, I mean, after all, it is what I went to school for and wanted to do. However, the starting salary for a chip designer (Intel / AMD / HP / IBM) was literally less than I was making at a side job (I worked my way through my Ph.D) as an IT sysadmin. Not only that, people that I knew well that graduated before me would call me up and tell me it was worse than hell itself. 80 hour weeks? Completely normal, outside of the 2 hours of commute time. Barely make rent because you live in California? Check. Pages / Calls all hours of the day outside of work? Check. 80 hours? You mean 100 hours a week leading up to a release, right? Check.

Looking back on it, it seems this was "the challenging" and if you made it past this (something like 5 years on) things calmed down for a chip designer and you moved into a more "modest" 60-80 hours a week role with less pressure and somewhat of a pay increase.

Yes, how do you attract talent under those conditions? It is not flashy work, takes a lot of schooling and the rewards are low. At least medical doctors can kind of look forward to "well, I can make _real_ money doing this", and have the satisfaction of "I helped a lot of people".

Thanks for posting, I thought the same thing... my (useless data point of one) results showed 100% accuracy except the last four, which I thought "wow, I am just guessing now, can literally not see a difference".

No, OP is correct. I was teaching CS at a uni two years ago... files, directories, filesystem hierarchy, but yes, even just a file, this is a strange concept to them.

It is not a insurmountable hurdle, but it is interesting in the sense that things like git, programming, etc, all deal with files and filesystem hierarchies, and the students have never seen this, so it makes it one more thing to add to the (ever growing) list of things they need to know before we jump in.

> be able to understand and empathize with the various (and often opposing) groups involved in a topic

Interestingly, I have seen Elon (DOGE) and others outside of politics (that mega-church leader) telling the public (dare I say, their followers) that one of the main problems with America is empathy, and that we need to _stop_ empathizing with others.

I am not sure, and it may be this persons culture/background, but I do know that at a college/uni, your advisors/reviewers would tell you not to do the adjective/drama stuff, as it adds no real value to a scientific/technical paper.

e.g. potentially-devastating, hugely disruptive, special critical, greatly reducing, valuable milestone, almost completely, ambitious pragmatic, most or nearly all, existing practical.

I have not actually heard that argument. It has always been noted that Benz invented the car, and Ford invented the assembly line, for cars.

> Connectors are actually extremely difficult to make.

While your points listed are valid, we have been making connectors that overcome these points for decades, in some cases approaching the century mark.

> I'm not surprised at all that they are running into issues here, these cards are pulling 500+ watts. That is a LOT of current.

Nonsense. I used to work at an industrial power generation company. 500W is _nothing_. At 12VDC, that is 41.66A of current. A few, small, well made pins and wires can handle that. It should not be a big deal to overcome that. We have overcome that in cars (which undergo _extreme_ temperature and environmental changes, in mere minutes and hours, daily, for years), space stations (geez), appliances, and thousands of other industrial applications that you do not see (robots, cranes, elevators, equipment in fields and farmlands, equipment in mines, equipment misused by people)... and those systems fail less frequently than Nvidia connectors. But your comment would lead one to think that building a connector with twelve pins on it to handle a whopping (I am joking) 500W (not much, really, I have had connectors in equipment that needed to handle 1,000,000Watts of power, OUTDOORS, IN THE RAIN, and be taken apart and put back together DAILY) is an insurmountable task.

There is something strangely magical about the pictures of the city streets at night. Lack of trash? How clean the roads are? The lighting? I have been out at night in plenty of places (not Japan), but it never looks like this. At first I thought it was their camera, but I think it is just Japan at night?

Used to use sublime, and wanted to purchase a license, but it is only good for the version you are on. Since I use gentoo and it upgrades frequently, my license would require me to hold it back, and eventually it will break. How do others deal with this? Just keep purchasing a license?

These guys killed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YS_7U0mDgA

Clicked the link without looking (shame on me), did not realize X/twitter/whatever was trying to disable the back button.

People still do that? Wow.

It really makes me wonder how people think about "free" services, probably owned by a company/corporation/person (e.g. not the government), and get amused/angry/whatever that they can be moderated. Forgetting about if whatever they posted it "right" or "wrong", this reminds me of people I personally saw during covid yelling at WalMart workers that they had the "right" to be in walmart without a mask. Uh, no, its a company, and they can kick you out for any, or even no reason.

Again, not taking sides, just thinking.

While I agree with:

> Fools and their money, etc etc

And certainly Mc is not what it used to be (the MC-1700 receiver for example, was great)... you are slamming an "empty box" unfairly. It has:

  - A light, well, ok, pretty empty.
  - Removable back wall. Eh, ok.
  - A IR to turn on and off devices.  Hrmm. 
  - It can control other DinkyLink devices (I did not make that up)
  - Trigger control to control other audio devices. Hrmm. 
  - It is a sturdy metal box (go online and purchase a nice one, I bet they are hundreds of bucks)

To be honest, I have paid $300 for nice rackmount enclosures with handles that were custom made.