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Thanks for sharing your product journey. Making hardware products is very interesting, when a single guy does it.

Would you mind sharing some of your prototype to production journey?

- How did you find companies that make the parts (pcb, enclosure)?

- How do you assemble all the parts (do you do that yourself or did you find a company to do that for you)?


> - How did you find companies that make the parts (pcb, enclosure)?

For the PCB, it came down to who could meet the specs that I needed for the board. I recall the three important specs being BGA pad spacing, wire thickness, and wire spacing. The ICE40 was the aggressing chip IIRC. I ended up using nextpcb.com.

For the enclosure, I think I just Googled some and had 3 different manufacturers make the same enclosure, and chose the best one to mass produce. I ended up using mfgproto.com.

> - How do you assemble all the parts (do you do that yourself or did you find a company to do that for you)?

For the PCB, I had NextPCB do PCBA, except for the BGAs (which I soldered myself, 500 of them!) and motion sensors, because I didn't trust mailing my high-value stock to China during Chipageddon. That was likely a mistake -- in the future I would have them assemble everything, because their process isn't designed for how I wanted to do things, and soldering that many BGAs sucked.

For the final assembly I did everything by hand (insert PCB into the enclosure, screw in PCB screws, connect battery, add battery shims [to prevent rattling], add RTV gasket to the backplate, screw in backplate screws, add lens adhesive, focus lens while streaming images). It's a ton of manual labor!


Feels like science papers need a comment section. Replace peer-review with public-review. A way for authors to interact with the larger (science) community.

https://www.papertalk.xyz/ was on HN Frontpage but seems to not have gained any traction (yet).

Maybe arxiv should consider implementing it or integrating with some 3rd party?


I strongly agree!

alphaXiv (https://alphaxiv.org/) is a discussion layer on top of arXiv, and it's starting to gain a lot of traction.

You can replace the arXiv URL with "alphaXiv" to get to the discussion: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16710https://alphaxiv.org/abs/2404.16710

Disclaimer: I'm currently helping out with alphaXiv -- it's a fun project out of Stanford


Openreview is nice. I guess it could integrate with arxiv to allow preprints but someone needs to pay for moderation if we are to keep a high standard of comments.


That’s a great idea. In a way, HN is that for many papers in topics that the HN community resonates with

Are there other communities that also post scientific papers and comment publicly? Even if the community isn’t exclusively about science?


One of the sites has a fantastic landing page: https://needle.tools/ (you scroll through 3D scenes)


the marketing is indeed super slick, in terms of added value for the framework, as needle is built on top of threejs, I'm not sure I'll bite


I only skimmed the landing page but it seems like it helps more with the while pipeline (asset creation, packing and optimising) rather than just the end rendered.


I admit it's really cool, but it's not a good fit for a landing page IMO. Would be great if it was behind a "demo" button or something.

Though maybe I'm not the target audience.


And I hope we will have good AIs running on our own hardware. I obviously want to use AI to create lots of porn for me. And that is really no one else s business.

Speaking of - I already heard of a project that is fine-tuning StableDiffusion to produce porn.


How do they have sooo many employees. They are running a few websites and a bunch of apps. I can understand how they would need a hundred people for that. They have a massive userbase. So I can understand how they would need a thousand people just to deal with tech at scale and support.

But how do you manage to have so many people that you can fire 10k ?! If I googled well, they appear to have 72k employees. Where did you find the management that thought having 72k employees is reasonable to operate a bunch of websites and apps ?!


So they are using sound waves to form very exact force-fields in 3D. But when you throw matter in there, would that not interact and reflect all the waves in unpredictable ways, destroying the very exact force-field pattern they are trying to achieve?


I asked it how to do something with an AWS cli tool. ChatGPT invented a new parameter that looked like a programmer would come up with it and it would do exactly what I was looking for (I assumed many people had my problem before).

aws cloudfront update-distribution --id <distribution-id> --distribution-config <new-config> --no-reset-origin-access-identity

Took me a while to figure out that the parameter --no-reset-origin-access-identity was not only not working. But it did never exist on any version of the cli tool.


Same here. ChatGPT invented a feature of our API and wrote an example script. User then complained to us that it's not working.


I asked it to create a COBOL program to connect to AWS and create an S3 Bucket...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991767


Did you not think to check the docs? (Srs question)


ChatGPT was my first choice just because I want to know if it is any good at helping me with my work.

But for this problem (CF-Distribution lost OAC settings when updating the root file), all the google fu in the world did not help me. It turned out that I had to update my aws-cli and my problem went away. Apparently no one else on the internet had that problem, so only my gut could help me figure it out.


At least in my experience, the aws docs are difficult to understand at best, and horrifically outdated and contradictory at worst.


Computer Science?

If you just want a career in making computer software. Build something. Then do it again. Google all the stuff you need to build your current thing. After a few month it will be obvious to you that you can build software. Then talk to companies about junior positions. Tell them you are self-taught and show them the stuff you have built already.

Best to talk to a company (usually small companies are easier), where you are allowed to talk to a programmer early on. The fact that you learned everything by yourself means they do not have to hold your hand all the time. Hand-holding time is the most important consideration for me, when taking on junior devs.


Does not matter if it is more safe or not. It is typical goverment overreach. Me wearing a helmet is no ones business but my own. It has no effect whatsoever on anyone else in society.


A possible steel man for the opposite position could be that a person hospitalized because of a preventable injury to the head will be of a greater cost to society, and that the sacrifice of personal liberty is outweighed by every dollar going towards something more beneficial.

I'm not saying I totally agree with that, but I think it's an argument that's rarely articulated, whereas the more reductive argument of keeping everyone "safe" is almost always the default.


You're emphatically wrong. If we have an accident and you die as a result of not wearing a helmet then your estate can file a wrongful death lawsuit against me. If there was a helmet law in place and you weren't wearing a helmet at the time of the accident then your estate is going to have a much more difficult time winning a wrongful death lawsuit. Your actions have consequences for others and frankly it's rather childish to try to pretend they don't.


> It has no effect whatsoever on anyone else in society

If you die or not in an accident makes an enormous difference in society, especially for the other people involved in the accident.


Your brains splayed out on the concrete has an effect on my child as she watches you die a gruesome death...


Is your child specifically sensitive to brains? If she sees me lying at the end of a long red smear in a pool of blood with my head intact, but with my leg ripped off and my other limbs contorted into absurd positions, is she likely to have no lasting effects.

Fascinating child.


This is a logic failure; I didn't say specifically or exclusively brains, I provided an example of one of the many gruesome ways your dead body would cause harm to others based on your poor decision making skills.



Thanks. I did a re-release and deleted the database of forms. Link is now updated.


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