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- readingnewsUnpopular 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:
Not that it is worth $1500, maybe $300, and at the same quality as that box looks with the glass front, probably $500, but again, saying $1500 for empty box is kind of unfair.- 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.
- How things change... I recall having a subscription (had one of those friends who always seemed to know what was coming out right before it came out) right when they started publishing, what was that, 1994? It was so cool.
I just viewed the front page, looks like the definition of "internet chum".
But seriously, to upend Google, you are going to need to be the default on what people use, which I think for now is phones.
Another barrier, maybe they need to get away from this: "will require succeeding at home and growing revenue, which largely comes from running ads." So what do you do when everyone runs some ublock-origin thing? We need to figure out a search monetization beyond "feed me weird things I do not want" on the sidebar. Should websites pay? No, wait, then only those with real money are on the web. Should we pay? Now, wait, we have had it for "free" for too long (could be wrong, I might at this stage in the game pay to have an actual search engine, like say google circa-internet 2004, of course the net was a different place, but still).
- That is not as easy as it looks. My granparents had a number of tops like that (not German, but same style you threw it with a string)... none of the kids could get them to work, and (comically) none of the adults could get them to work either. Some child would find them during the holidays and some grandparent would say "oh yes I remember playing with those, you use a string" (goes and finds string, spends next 15 minutes proving they just can not do it). Then the kids would run off and spend an hour trying to get it to work, unsuccessfully.
I think when I see this video, we all were throwing it upside down.
- I ran a company building electronic devices, so I had a lot of parts (LCR, transformers, chassis, screws, wires, connectors, misc)
I used to use those plastic bins that you see a lot of. I sorted by both resistor, and resistance series. So one bin would be bins of metal film, sorted by series with printable cards on the front drawers of each. Another bin would be carbon composition, another wire wound, etc. One bin had kind of misc (diodes, bridges, transistors), another small screws, another large screws, etc.What types of storage do you use?
The thing that lets me grab the part the fastest. I purchased my bins explicitly so I could get my round nose pliers into them easily and grab a resistor, as I always seemed to have round nose pliers in my right hand, and opened the drawers with my left.Are you subscribed to an organizational philosophy?
See above comment. I will note that I had a short list of power resistors, and at first they were just bunched in with the regular resistors, but as they were larger (same with metal film and carbons, they are different sizes) it was slower to have them in one bin.Do you sort your resistors by resistance?I will say this, however, after several moves an the economic crashes we went through, it became not my first source of income, and I slowed down a lot, to the point that it is more of a hobby. At this point, I had no room for the bins, and so now I have the following: I purchased a bazillion ziploc bags, perhaps 2"x3" with a white writable area on the outside. I put the resistors in them in the same way as I describe above (e.g. start at 47ohms and move up with metal film, then carbon comp, then power) and I put them standing up in cardboard boxes that allow two of the bags to sit side by side. This has saved a ton of room, although obviously it is slower.
On the "keep finding spare parts between my toes and under pillows", yeah, if you want to get rid of that, you need to have iron-clad will power to find that one you dropped just a moment ago.