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choonway

339 karma · joined January 3, 2015

https://www.choonway.com
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choonway··on Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
ok now they have an actual reference and can animate it better haha.
choonway··on Ask HN: Any hope for removable, rechargable battery standards?
There is an open standard - USB PD - 48V 240W. If that's not enough (e.g. boiling water for coffee) you can always chain a few in parallel.

You don't really want to restrict yourself to just changing batteries because chemistries improve (e.g. LiFePO4, NIBs) etc.

choonway··on Robotic arms that assemble panels on solar farms
RX is called design for manufacturing. Nothing new.
choonway··on Swedish composer becomes Spotify's most-famous musician you've never heard of
the publishing under psuedonyms parts sounds a lot like overemployment.
choonway··on Getting into robotics as a software engineer
The best way to get into it without investing money in all that hardware is to play with a simulator. My preference is CoppeliaSim - due to it's user friendliness.

https://www.coppeliarobotics.com/

But take your pick there are many to choose from.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15691...

choonway··on Lego Mechanical Computer
I think 3d printing using organic semiconductor filaments will be the way to go.
choonway··on Circles do not exist
but until then, figuring out micron level tolerances over meters can be done with perfect circles using Non Uniform Rational B(Basis)-Splines.
choonway··on Write your passwords down (2010)
this is 2023, use KeepassX. If you're really paranoid, store it on a offline laptop.

but if you want real security, use a security token (e.g. yubikey) or some other smartcard solution.

choonway··on The design thinking movement is absurd (2018)
> Design Thinkers giver their students power without knowledge, “creative confidence” without actual capabilities.

this is the problem. a lot of curicculum time has been taken away from basic/fundamental skills in order to do DT.

choonway··on A Reply to Josef Průša
Forget patents and copyrights and any IP law invention. Ask any cryptographer. The only two things that really work are:

1. Trade Secrets

2. Public Domain

choonway··on Community’s 25yrs without a newborn shows scale of Japan’s population crisis
On the contrary, there is not enough people. you need to have enough babies so that we can _statistically_ cultivate a large enough talent pool - which we need to develop the next gen tech.

You can't let rich/talented hoard resources so that they can pour inordinate resources to their one kid and 'expect' them to inherit the talent. Nature simply doesn't work this way.

choonway··on Ao486_MiSTer: i486 core for the MiSTer FPGA gaming system
no, but it can certainly run Windows NT.
choonway··on On CAD
CAD should be a set of tools to take trial and error out of the workflow as much as possible.

and the pain point of most of these tools is that they don't talk tools outside of the ecosystem very well.

choonway··on Beaming solar energy from space
competition from china. don’t want to fall behind like with the hypersonics and rail guns
choonway··on As last module docks, China completes its space station
The difficulty is not about joining large structures airtight. otherwise we would have trouble with building commercial aircraft.

the problem is when you want to make something out from the absolute minimim weight possible due to economy of putting things into space, then you can't do with any connections whatsoever.

The pressure of -1 bar isn't particularly challenging engineering wise.

choonway··on As last module docks, China completes its space station
from a mechanical engineering standpoint, a torus is also easier to construct than a sphere.
choonway··on Nascar driver stuns to qualify for championship with GameCube move
does this count as a zero day? hardly going to see it being allowed in further races.
choonway··on Show HN: ChIPs – A Polycube/Voxel Construction Set
You can try looking at the marching cubes algorithm.
choonway··on How gray became the king of color
The thing about grey is that it is easy to paint over to get a decent effect.
choonway··on A 17-year-old designed a novel synchronous reluctance motor
>He also doesn't seem to have a dyno which makes taking data and testing a lot easier.

how do you test without a dyno? and isn't it easy to set up a electrical generator tied to a high wattage variable resistor to do it?

choonway··on The Ends of Education
the educational system is there to sort people with something vaguely relevant in the current economy. that is all.
choonway··on The “bicameral mind” 30 years on (2007)
there wasn’t enough time to change the script before alphago beat lee sedol.

they did manage to add some alphago references in s2 though.

choonway··on A chess robot in Moscow has broken the finger of its human opponent
It shoudn't even be anywhere near an adult for that matter. Even a trained operator wouldn't be putting fingers where there was no safety interlock.

for example, two buttons you must keep pressed with both hands before the robot starts to move and will stop immediately once you prematurely let go of it.

choonway··on Lockheed Martin Prepar 3D
the point of these expensive simulators is such that you can practice all the emergency procedures in the manual.
choonway··on Lockheed Martin Prepar 3D
it’s not implemented because it’s a lot of work and doesn’t add to training value.

The time would be better spent on improving damage models

choonway··on On the use of a life (2020)
The correct fix is to make the costs of developing such innovations within the personal reach of those who can imagine it.
choonway··on The giant hangar poised for an aviation revolution
Poised for a breakthrough in luxury travel? ok. i'd accept that. silent and smooth travel (as long as you can avoid inclement weather).
choonway··on Construction is life
and why can’t civil structures do the same?
choonway··on Construction is life
haha. the exact same language was used when major semicon foundries was stuck at 14nm for a while.

sometimes solving multiple hard problems simultaneously is easier and yields better results than trying to solve individual problems on their own, due to synergies that can be taken advantage of.

however, the “divide and conquer” adage has stuck too hard into the minds of ordinary people and going against it - that’s the really hard part.

choonway··on Construction is life
You can still design 99% of the bridges in existence today with commercially available software and hardware from 10 years ago.

Why do you want to make a bridge that barely stands?

Instead you want your engineer to:

1. build it cheaply and quickly,

2. maintenance is cheap and non disruptive.

3. probability of unplanned failure is small, eg once in 100,000 years

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