Hacker News Reader

e-_pusheron Ask HN: Has the iPad Replaced Your Laptop?

Which e-ink tablet are you using?

e-_pusheron GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

Keep it up, I am a fan of your ebooks. What were you doing in the semi industry, out of curiosity? ASIC design related ? (Looking at your username)

e-_pusheron Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040

I wish there was an easy way to embed a KiCad layout to a webpage in a zoomable format for design reviews. One way is to export an SVG file and show it on the web, but in my experience this starts to choke on large boards.

This website has a cool implementation of a KiCad web viewer:

https://climbers.net/sbc/kicad-web-viewer/

e-_pusheron Amazon Is Pausing Hiring for Corporate Workforce

Meaning no warehouse workers

e-_pusheron I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

Do you have any contacts you recommend for this process?

e-_pusheron An Open-Source HDMI Capture Card

Wow. This looks great, I would need to get my hands on some of these boards …

e-_pusheron The great semiconductor drought may be about to break

Sounds like good news for companies trying to build right now!

e-_pusheron An Open-Source HDMI Capture Card

Does anyone know what is the latency one might expect from an HDMI capture card like this?

e-_pusheron An Open-Source HDMI Capture Card

TLDR: with higher speed designs, there is not much info in the hobbyist space, because the designs get more complicated in terms of pcb layout, signal integrity and so on, and a lot of the tools used for more advanced PCB design work are unfortunately closed source. That said it is possible to do successful high speed designs with some rules of thumb that 90% would work on the first board dev. And open source tools like KiCad are getting there in terms of feature parity with the closed source tools. Happy to talk, my contact info is in my profile.

e-_pusheron My Favourite Computer, an Old Mac

Love this stuff! What is the tablet that is standing to the left of the Mac?

Shameless plug to a blog post I wrote a while back, where I sung the praise of my old laptop that is running Windows 3.1.

https://iskender.ee/2022/05/16/Laptop-1992.html

e-_pusheron TV backlight compensation (2020)

This is really cool. Is there a way to do a global shader like this in Android?

e-_pusheron TV backlight compensation (2020)

What do you mean by incompatibility with banking apps? I am also interested in what it would take to do a global shader on Android.

e-_pusheron Amazon’s Kindle Scribe is an E Ink tablet for reading and writing

What do you mean by the kobo screen being inaccurate? Is this for the stylus of the touch itself? I was considering buying a kobo but this comment scares me a bit now.

e-_pusheron Amazon’s Kindle Scribe is an E Ink tablet for reading and writing

What do you mean by the calibration? Like the pen doesn't ink where you touch the screen? Which Boox model does this affect?

e-_pusheron Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

Great write up. Color overall is a rabbit hole of a topic. I have been looking into color matching, delta E etc. and it is been surprise to realize that the variances of human vision mean that the field of colorimetry is as much of an art as it is science.

e-_pusheron The tooling ecosystem that adds joy to KiCad

What kind of boards are you making? I used skidl a lot but I ran into two challanges, wondering if you have run into these also: 1) There was no easy way to combine schematic and skidl-based circuits. This was a problem at a company environment where design reviews become impossible because nobody else could write their heads around a power converter circuit made in skidl. Ideally I would have wanted to be able to drop in a "skidl-block" that would just have a fabric of a bunch of digital connections, and let analog circuits remain as graphical schematics. 2) I really like KiCad's backannotation feature for adjusting BGA fanouts and whatnot from the layout. It is really fast and makes doing layout much more pleasurable (that is a standard feature also in all the big name commercial ECAD suites). Using skidl broke my backannotation flow, at least that was the case ~6 months ago which is the last time I used skidl.

e-_pusheron Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

For which product categories? There is already a lot of textiles and automotive manufacturing in Turkey and has been for many years.

e-_pusheron Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

The main issue with working as an EE is that you can’t get useful experience without working in the industry and picking up all sorts of tacit knowledge that one can grab only by working. This creates a huge gate keeping effect. Contrast that with SW where so much of the sausage making is accessible in the form of open source projects.

Another difficulty is that with the offshoring of so much EE work to Taiwan etc, many US companies only want to hire senior EEs who can direct projects overseas. This unfortunately kills of paths of growth for junior EEs in the US.

e-_pusheron A Windows 95-like shell for Windows 3.1x

The design really looks solid - do you remember where you drew inspirations from?

Cok guzel, helal olsun :)

e-_pusheron Watching an acquirer ruin your company

PowerPoint originally was an acquisition by Microsoft and by all accounts it seems to have been a “perfect” acquisition.

e-_pusheron Raspberry Pi Pico W: your $6 IoT platform

Super cool - do you have a write up link for your tricolor screen project?

e-_pusheron If it isn't going to work, just shut it down

As always, all advice is wrong. While pivots are difficult to execute, many successful products came out of pivots like PowerPoint :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forethought,_Inc.

e-_pusheron Ask HN-Beginner Arduino Kits

I would go with kits from Adafruit and Sparkfun. Avoid stuff of off aliexpress. Like others said cheap kits from Aliexpress come with scant documentation and even I have a hard time using dev kits I bought from there and have to rely random internet posts etc (and I do electrical engineering for a living)

e-_pusheron Hardware-accelerated Linux virtual machines on jailbroken iPhone 12 / iOS 14.1

Surface Book was a step in this direction. The base of the computer had a discrete MVidia GPU, so you could run heavy GPU loads from the tablet section of the computer while connected to the base. If the base was removed, only the onboard Intel GPU was available.

e-_pusheron Update on Hiring Plans

“Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”

e-_pusheron The Modos Paper Laptop

Yes the battery is long dead, so I always run it off of wall power. I have though about making a 3D printed modern day battery that is shaped like a NiMh battery of old, but has LiIon batteries inside, gets charged off of USBC, and provides voltage at the same level that the original NiMh would provide. Should be doable, but never got around to it.

e-_pusheron The Modos Paper Laptop

For my distraction-free writing, the solution I found was to buy a 1992 grayscale LCD 386 laptop. I can do writing in Word that I have installed on Windows 3.1 and then open them later on my modern day computer with a floppy disk drive. This setup works great and I can help answer questions if anyone is curious.

I was going to write a blog post about this but I ended up sitting on the draft for too long and forgot about it, I really should publish that post :)

e-_pusheron How to resurrect a coral reef

Is the idea to use some kind of underwater robot to plant reefs? I couldn’t tell from the website.

e-_pusheron It's now your fault they don't know about it

Sounds like a company that is synonyms with a rainforest.

e-_pusheron Show HN: Full Freeciv client running on WebAssembly

Exciting project. Where is the webassembly source located? I could not find it here : https://github.com/longturn/freeciv21