msadowski

The 12 pdfs are equally annoying to freelancers.

I think what hurts here are how the fees are structured. If I charge client $100, the invoice will show this number. This will also be the income I’ll be reporting to tax authorities, so I have to pay income tax on $100, and an Upwork fee will be automatically deducted. I don’t know if they would have a legal way to do this but I would much rather my invoice showed $90 in this case since I never even had the chance to see the full $100.

Wow, I thought they would honor the 5% charge till the end of the contracts but it seems they will go to 10% by the end of the year.

Since Upwork theoretically locks you in for 2 years with a client, I’m expecting there will be a small exodus of people with long-term projects . I’d much rather sort out invoicing myself and get paid through Stripe than lose out on extra 5%.

In the robotics world many people use PlotJuggler (https://plotjuggler.io/) that, among other things, sports csv files.

I’ve learned about Long Covid after Dianna Cowern aka The Physics Girl started mentioning on her Twitter (https://twitter.com/thephysicsgirl) that she has it. Unfortunately she had to be admitted to ER recently due to it. In the comments to her posts I’ve seen a lot of folks from the US recommending doctors specializing in long covid. Hope you recover soon! This disease is awful.

When you add a link to raindrop.io you can add it to any of your folders. Tags are yet another thing they support but I don’t use them extensively.

This is actually the reason why I stated a newsletter (weeklyrobotics.com). I was finding things on the Internet that were interesting, but then I could never find them again. I discovered that limiting search to my own domain made it much easier.

I’m using raindrop.io to save all the bookmarks in one place, and then while working on them I go through the top of the unsorted bookmarks, and select the ones I will feature in the newsletter.

This still doesn’t solve the problem of heaps of unsorted links (over 1.4k after around 3 years).

If I was to do something that you describe, I would probably look into dedicating some time into organizing your bookmarks, and if taking it to the next level then I would consider using TriliumNotes for making notes and categorizing the knowledge.

This looks cool! Are you going to support multiple currencies?

I’ve tried sharing my robotics newsletter (https://www.weeklyrobotics.com/) on HN on numerous occasions and sometimes content that I found interesting but it never seemed to get too much attention. I figured I’m either unlucky or the community is not that interested in robotics.

Shameless plug: I hope my technical robotics newsletter would hit a spot for you: https://www.weeklyrobotics.com/

I’m very much robotics oriented but I currently support two people on GitHub:

- Davide Faconti (https://github.com/facontidavide) for his work on BehaviorTrees that are game changing for some projects and for his plotting library that saved me hours of time debugging robotics systems

- Atsushi Sakai (https://github.com/AtsushiSakai) for his collection PythonRobotics with neat visualizations of some of the concepts

DTE | Reykjavík, Iceland or Canada | Onsite and Remote

At DTE (https://dte.ai/), we create solutions for real-time metals analysis. If you like the idea of your work involving shooting lasers, you will feel right at home.

The positions we are looking to fill soon include the following:

* Signal Processing Software Engineer

* Software Architect

* DevOps Lead

* Senior Data Engineer - job ad TBA

* Senior ML Engineer - job ad TBA

* Front End Developer - Elixir or React - job ad TBA

You will find more positions at https://dteehf.bamboohr.com/careers/.

Remote is possible for some jobs. Occasional travel to the office in Iceland might be expected for some of them.

In case of questions, please shoot me an e-mail at: Mateusz.Sadowski.ext@[domain_from_the_first_paragraph]. To apply to any of the positions, please use the careers page.

Would anyone have any recommendations on material for learning Rust? Is The Rust Programming Language still the best way to start?

I really enjoyed this documentary about Makani that was building “flying wind turbines”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE

This reminds me of this thread on the Ardupilot forum from someone in the field using drones to find poachers: https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/autonomous-anti-poaching-dro... .

The gist of it was that the drones were not that effective at spotting poachers (8 cases in two years of operations), and even if you spot them they will likely be gone by the time someone can arrive there.

Wow, this is the most complete write up on the subject I have come across. I’ve been consulting for 4 years and all the points ring true.

People are quite sure the government is involved in some way, either by this being done by a government-owned companies that were stuffed with their own as soon as the current party got in power, or some of them allowed it to happen and they will be protected at all cost.

They provide a perfect level of incompetence, and bigotry. If they win the next election the country is done for.

I had a call with a Polish government last year to get access to one of the government portals and they were asking me to move my head to the side and also move a palm of my hand very slowly in front of my face.

Interesting times.

Initially I had a lot of luck on UpWork and managed to find some clients that I worked with for over a year. Initially, I was getting 90% of job requests from Upwork and 10% from my blog and LinkedIn, but about year ago the proportions flipped the other way round.

I think this post is a treasure trove of good advice. I’ll have to do some deeper reading of this as the advice seem solid.

Since I’ve quit my last job in 2018 I feel like I’ve tried it all when it comes to revenue sources:

* consulting - still my main source of income

* writing a newsletter - brings about $400-$600 a month but there are some dry days on the horizon

* selling newsletter merch - I’m in red every month with only one t-shirt design

* evaluating EU project proposals - nice side gig 1-2 times a year

* writing a course with a publisher - after 3 months I’m nowhere near getting a good return of investment on the time spent but it was fun and I’d do it again

* writing an influencer posts on LinkedIn - was a one-off thing but paid really well

I feel like doing too many things at one could be a problem for me and focusing on a subset of things could bring better results.

If you are in a position to work for yourself then I would highly recommend it.

This idea reminds me of LiGo batteries (https://ebikes.ca/product-info/grin-products/ligo-batteries....).

I think when it comes to the car this idea could be viable but I think the risk is potential change with the weight distribution. You could probably have some weights that are replaced with batteries when you upgrade to keep the weight constant but then you are reducing your range.

My only advice would be create good content and make it consistent.

Each of my issue title is: “WR: Issue #X” and consistently I get an open rate of around 45% consistently, because I hope people find my work useful.

I also make the newsletter available on the web and provide an RSS feed to make it as easy as possible to get latest issues.

Also, if you use Mailchimp (and I imagine similar) the open rate is not counted if someone doesn't open your tracking pixel. They would only get counted if they click on a link.

Back in 2018, Zephyr stayed in the air for close to 26 days: https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-08-ai...

Hi HN!

Recently while working on my newsletter [0] I came across Zipline using microphones on their fixed-wings for aircraft detection, creating a very informative blog post in the process. I'll be curious to seeing if they manage to get this solution certified, given that they cannot detect balloons and gliders.

If you like the linked blog post then you might also like the ICRA 2022 presentation [1] by Gavin Ananda on the subject that goes into even more detail.

[0] https://www.weeklyrobotics.com/ [1] https://youtu.be/RLc95gnEzok

I love the Orbital Index! It’s my only resource on space news and every week I’m learning a ton!

I’ve been working on a robotics newsletter for close to 4 years now. Maybe someone here will find it interesting https://www.weeklyrobotics.com/

Yes, and for me to do that the client needs to sort out their payment issues first. I'm glad I'm not dependent on timely payments from this platform but if I was I would be livid.

One more to the list: GITAI is hoping to send a centaur-like rover with a robot torso in mid-2020[0]. Given that the current version is using some off the shelf sensor I have no idea how realistic is this timeline though.

[0] https://gitai.tech/en/2022/02/10/gitai-develops-lunar-roboti...

I’m so excited about the SteamDeck. My hope is that I’ll be able to install Ubuntu on it and turn it into an ultimate robot controller.

If I can also dock it to my screen, keyboard and mouse then I can see myself doing some light development on it too.

It depends what you are interested in. My latest find from this week is the Introduction to Autonomous Robots open source book: https://github.com/Introduction-to-Autonomous-Robots/Introdu....

If you were looking for news then sUASnews is great for some catching up on drones. For robotics I often find articles on IEEE Spectrum and The Robot Report interesting.

I’ve been rubbing it for over 3 years now and I’m approaching 3k e-mail subscribers. I feature it quite a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter and sometimes I would share some issues on /r/robotics or HN.

So far the best way I’ve found for growing subscribers is trading shoutouts with other newsletters but I didn’t experiment much with paid ads.