serviceberry

Fair enough, but on the flip side - you either want to get into electronics or not. If not, there's no real point in spending the money, even if it's $2. If you do, then you probably don't yet have an understanding of what features you need, and the cheapest option will actually hold you back.

Some specific issues: first, the number of inputs. A lot of circuit debugging is about "let's see how signal A looks like when signal B happens" (B might be a bus clock or something like that). So, a lot of the time, you need two inputs, not one.

Second issue: even hobby MCUs generally run faster than 4 MHz, so you might need more bandwidth to monitor I/O, even for old-school Arduino stuff - let alone RP2040.

Third issue: for anything analog, from audio equipment to household appliances, the 0-6 V input range just doesn't cut it.

I'm not trying to dunk on this project: I think it's about as good as you can do for the price, and it's clearly a passion thing for the author. But if you can afford it, and if you want to learn electronics, a "real" oscilloscope is almost certainly a better deal.

I think projects like that would have been a godsend 2-3 decades ago, when even a basic oscilloscope costed as much as a used car.

Nowadays, very good oscilloscopes with 200 MHz bandwidth, good user interfaces, and responsive displays are selling for $300 - I'm talking Siglent, Rigol, UNI-T. So the merits of DIYing something much worse just aren't quite there. It's that one piece of equipment you use to troubleshoot all your other designs, so you want it to be dependable, easy to use, and accurate.

This is not to say it's not a fun, geeky project to work on and publish... but you know, only once you have a real oscilloscope. If you're just setting up, do yourself a favor and spend a bit more money on this. The remaining equipment is not nearly as critical.

"Microplastics found in X" has become a pretty weird sport.

The phenomenon is worth studying, but it's not hugely surprising given how ubiquitous they are (another thing you find in every human, probably in higher quantities, is sand). But despite tons of scrutiny, there are no studies showing that it's actually hurting us.

We've done some really sketchy things in the early days of industry (leaded gasoline, etc), and have gotten into this overdrive where we're jumping the gun on a lot of substances that are probably not bad. Every year, you have several headlines in the mold of "X is everywhere and might be killing us"... but never really followed by that "oh yeah, it was really killing us" part.

Mind you, we're having this conversation on a link aggregator site owned by a company...

Reddit is convenient. It's literally all your interests in one place. And for some interests, it's the best place to go.

Most people don't care who owns the platform. Someone always will. It's as abstract as someone telling them that they shouldn't be letting Apple or Microsoft control their OS. To a regular person, the "Linux alternative" isn't freedom, it's letting Canonical run the show.

> Why don’t we just fork it?

There's plenty of Reddit forks. Lemmy is a fork by the fediverse people that looks pretty much the same as the old Reddit.

The problem isn't the software, it's attracting and retaining a community. It's the same exact problem you have with Twitter: when the shenanigans started, people created five competing forks, fracturing the user base of people willing to migrate. And now, most of them are back to Twitter, because that's where the action is.

Reddit did a lot of things that riled up a minority of users (API changes, the "new Reddit" redesign, etc), but they'd need to upset a majority for the platform to crumble. And I bet this won't happen here; no way they'd allow of the "top 50" subreddits, like /r/aww, to enable paywalls.

> The truth is we are constantly moving further and further away from the silicon.

Are we? We're constantly changing abstractions, but we don't keep adding them all that often. Operating systems and high-level programming languages emerged in the 1960s. Since then, the only fundamentally new layer of abstraction were virtual machines (JVM, browser JS, hardware virtualization, etc). There's still plenty of hardware-specific APIs, you still debug assembly when something crashes, you still optimize databases for specific storage technologies and multimedia transcoders for specific CPU architectures...

> Compared to what though? Compared to Limeware/Kaazaa back in the day, or compared to buying records in a store?

Compared to curation by other humans. Be it music labels, magazines, radio DJs, or a person sharing their playlist or giving you a mixtape.

In this model, tastes never overlap perfectly, so you're exposed to unfamiliar music fairly regularly, often in some emotional context that makes you more likely to accept something new.

Algorithms don't really do that. They could, but no one is designing them that way. If I listen predominantly to female vocalists on Spotify for a week, I'm only getting female vocalists from now on.

I really don't see how. When students are first exposed to computer programming, it might make sense to start with toy / compact languages that don't have any real-world use. But assembly is not the first language you're supposed to learn!

It's very utilitarian and most commonly just used for debugging and reverse engineering. So why would you waste time on the assembly language of a long-obsolete platform?

Plus, the best way to learn assembly is to experiment. Write some code in your favorite language and look at the intermediate assembler output, or peek under the hood with objdump or gdb. Try to make changes and see what happens. Yes, you can do that with an emulator of a vintage computer, but it's going to be harder. You need to learn the architecture of that computer, including all the hardware and ROM facilities the assembly is interacting with to do something as simple as putting text on the screen... and none of this is going to be even remotely applicable to Linux (or Windows) on x86-64.

For folks who haven't operated an excavator, the trade-off with these mini-excavators isn't necessarily that they're underpowered. There are two other problems.

First, they are very wobbly and you're gonna be limited by that. You really need a fair amount of surface contact and a robust counterweight when you're extending the arm and moving boulders, pulling out roots, or digging into hard soil.

Second, you might look at specs and say "oh, cool, digging depth of 5 ft, I don't need more!". Except, this is attainable in one specific (and awkward) position of the excavator's boom and arm. It's less than that across most of the movement range.

Another thing to keep in mind that this is not like buying a car. An excavator or a tractor deprecates far more slowly, and many private owners keep them for 20-30 years. A diesel excavator will need DIY maintenance and simple repairs, but it should hold up for life. Battery-powered equipment will probably need new battery packs before that. Just something to keep in mind when figuring out the pros and cons. If you're in the suburbs, noise is a concern, but then, you honestly don't need your own excavator...

AI has some approximation of the incentives of whoever trained it. Unless it's handed to us from above, I don't see how that would work.

There's no setting for that, Google is intentionally not giving you that choice. You can append &udm=14 to the search URL in browser settings, but that constraints search results to the "web" subcategory, so you also lose fairly useful features, such as the calculator, weather infoboxes, etc.

Sure, but we're herd animals and also need validation, even if we're pretending not to. We go on a journey of self-discovery to Nepal so that we can talk to others how profound it was, etc.

I'm not dissing hobbies, I'm just saying that building stuff like that is a very lonely hobby, which is why such projects almost always fizzle out.

I'd go out on a limb and guess that the advice is meant for people who don't find them useful.

I don't, for two reasons. First, for looking up facts, they're nowhere near 100% dependable. If I need to check sources, might as well start there. Second, if someone made the effort to put useful content on the internet, I can grace them with a click.

I think that's the fate of every project like that. Not to take away from it, it's still fantastic and geeky. But at some point, you have this realization that you're pouring years of your life into something that is not only utterly useless, but also won't be appreciated by others. You can't even play Pong on it. There's literally nothing you can demo to non-nerds, other than "this device makes looks complicated and makes noise".

Maybe you'll make it to HN more than a decade later, but that's it. No one will buy it from you. Your heirs will toss it out. It... sucks.

I don't think it's an overt scam, but let's put it this way: as with auction houses, there is a disconnect between the service the company is providing and what the buyers think they're getting. And the companies have no special interest in correcting that.

For grading companies and for auction houses, the goal is to move the highest possible volume of goods at the highest possible valuation. They're not going out of their way to root out non-obvious fraud. They operate with the assumption that 99% of the traffic they're handling is legitimate, and of the 1% that's forged, only a small fraction of the buyers will ever find out. On the rare occasion it blows up, they can apologize and settle for an amount much less than what it would take to investigate every specimen with great zeal.

It's hard to generalize. Common microcontroller clock speeds range from 1 to 500 MHz. An 8-bit microcontroller running at 1 MHz will often work fine without any decoupling at all. A 32-bit microcontroller might not even boot without a ceramic capacitor nearby.

The basic answer is basically what the original article says. If you don't want the mental burden of figuring it out, the spec gives you safe defaults that should work for almost all uses. But it's almost never the case that you need to do it that way.

I don't think that's a useful comparison. Humans writing history books have agendas and biases, but they're usually fairly transparent. In contrast, LLM failure modes are more or less impenetrable and very non-human. You're just inexplicably served with some very convincing but incorrect stuff.

This strikes me as an odd claim. You don't hang around with a friend who makes things up because they somehow enhance your learning process. You hang around with them despite the fact they're annoyingly unreliable, presumably because you value their company for other reasons.

Let's say you're trying to get a university degree, but having a professor who makes up 20% of what they say. Is that helping you "learn well"?

> I haven't used any 4-function calculator that behaves like this; instead, I get (without clearing):

Then you haven't used very many calculators: https://tedmuller.us/Math/Calculator-1'Introduction.htm

I actually found this to be an odd mix. Are we selecting papers that had an influence on computer science (as in, the theory of computation), or that had an impact on technology? Or are we just using CS as a catch-all for "all things computer"?

The Turing paper is foundational for CS, but without it, would the technology have evolved differently? Probably not. Most software engineers have not read it. Conversely, the IP standard is a technological cornerstone, but there's hardly any science in it. It's just a specification of a fairly simple protocol that you need to know when doing almost anything network-adjacent.

It also models pumps in a pretty exaggerated way. Two pumps will prevent this basin from ever filling up despite constant rainfall, to the point of creating a concave water surface: https://imgur.com/a/PrYFJtP

> Clipped highlights in digital photography are simply impossible to eliminate in post-processing without conjuring nonexistent information. Even if you shoot raw.

Huh? This used to be true twenty years ago, but modern sensors in prosumer cameras capture a lot more dynamic range than can be displayed on the screen or conveyed in a standard JPEG. If you shoot raw, you absolutely have the information needed to rescue nominally clipped highlights. You get 2-4 stops of latitude without any real effort.

The problem here is different. If the rest of the scene is exposed correctly, you have to choose one or another. Overexposed highlights or underexposed subject. The workaround is to use tone mapping or local contrast tricks, but these easily give your photos a weird "HDR" look.

I don't think there's any AI-fication going on in that photo. The modified version has a more compressed tone curve to bring out more detail, along with jacked up saturation (especially evident for water). This is similar to what most cell phones do by default to make photos look more pleasing.

I do agree that the original looks better, but the author of the post clearly prefers the modified version.

It's really OK. With modern formulations such as SAC305 and with temperature-controlled stations, there's no real difference, and no need to stick to lead.

I think the resistance to the idea has two roots. First, there's a lot of old-timers who just didn't like the idea of the government meddling with their hobby, so they go out of their way to convince others to use leaded solder.

Second, the first years of the switch were painful. You needed to upgrade some equipment, the early alloys were not performing great, there were problems with tin whiskers (which aren't specific to lead-free soldering, but were apparently happening more commonly), etc. But these days are gone. The industry has moved on.

My best guess is that your soldering iron is running too hot, or that you're using the wrong kind of solder. It's generally not an issue.

Not really. A mechanical analog clock will typically have smooth motion, so 30 seconds into a minute, the minute hand will be halfway between two values.

Most quartz watches with analog displays work the same. I don't know about Big Ben, but it's possible the author is wrong about that example.

While I broadly agree with the concerns about using LLMs for "commoditized", large-scale phishing, isn't the study a bit lacking? Specifically, "click through" is a pretty poor metric for success.

If I receive a unique / targeted phishing email, I sure will check it out to understand what's going on and what they're after. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm falling for the actual scam.