skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: iFixit created a new USB-C, repairable soldering system
After years of making screwdrivers and teaching people to repair electronics, we just made our first electronic tool. It's been a journey for us to build while hewing to our repairable principles. We're really excited about it.

It's a USB-C powered soldering iron and smart battery power hub. Super repairable, of course. Our goal is to make soldering so easy everyone can do it:
https://www.ifixit.com/fixhub

We didn’t want to make just another iron, so we spent years sweating the details and crafting something that met our exacting standards. This is a high-performance iron: it can output 100W of heat, gets to soldering temperature in under 5 seconds, and automatically cools off when you set it down. The accelerometer detects when you pick it up and heats it back up. Keeping the iron at a lower temperature while you’re not soldering shouold prolong the life of the tip.

What’s the difference between this iron and other USB-C irons on the market? Here’s a quick list:

Higher power (our Smart Iron is 100W, competitors max out at 60W over USB-C, 88W over DC Supply)

Heat-resistant storage cap (you just have to try this out, it’s a real game changer in day-to-day use)
Polished user experience

A warranty and a local company to talk to (I can’t find any contact information for Miniware)

Comfier / more natural grip

Shorter soldering tip length

No-tangle, heat-resistant cable

Locking ring on the cable, so it can’t snag and get disconnected (this happens to me all the time on other irons)

More intuitive settings, either on the Power Station or on the computer

We used Web Serial https://caniuse.com/web-serial for the interface, which is only supported in Chromium browsers. The biggest bummer with that is that no mobile browsers support it, yet. Hopefully that changes soon.

Hardware is hard! It's been a journey for us. Happy to answer any questions about how we made it.

Schematics and repair information are online here: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/FixHub_Portable_Soldering_Stat...
I would argue they can get competitive advantage despite this, or thanks to this by squeezing more juice out of employees while externalizing some of the cost on employee health.
Is the Laugo Alien actually a simpler design, though? It seems like it must have a few more parts than a Glock 19, based on the schematic (page 15) and parts list (preceding pages):

https://mexarmory.pl/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/laugo-alien-...

For example, there are several more cross-pins holding the thing together.

When I called the Glock 19 the Platonic ideal, I did not mean to say it was perfect or better performing guns are not possible. What I meant to communicate, rather, was that it's pretty simple and yet very good.
They did indeed. But the reason they were so good at things like their space program was, in the end, an indication of why their system failed.

Basically, they were really good at building big devices/projects requiring state-orchestration of capital, like their space program, and many military projects like the T-34 and MiG-19. And turning rivers around in their tracks to build gigantic hydroelectric dams and so on.

But apparently that model does work so well when applied to consumer devices. That, and plus the fact that their population was generally too poor to buy them, is what kept them falling ever behind. The Soviets and their client states did make valiant efforts, but they tended to cost huge amounts of state capital, and for that and other reasons they never panned out.

For example the GDR once thought it could reverse its fortunes by devoting its capital and brainpower into the development of ground-breaking microchip (the U61000) that it hoped would take the Western market by storm. A brilliant achievement it was, but the production economics were never viable (from WP):

From 1977 the attempt to achieve a competitive edge in microchips against the research and development resources of the entire western world – in a state of just 16 million people – was perhaps always doomed to failure, but swallowed increasing amounts of internal resources and hard currency. GDR was some five to eight years behind the leading producers of USA and Japan. To produce one 64kb chip cost 40 marks, while in the West it cost 4.50 marks. To produce one 256kb chip cost 534 marks, while in the West it cost 5.00 to 7.00 marks.[2]

That, and plus the fact that even if they could built something (a car, say) that could compete with stuff built in the West, their population was generally too poor to buy it, is what kept them falling ever behind.

Thinking about this makes me nostalgic for the day when this was how competing empires once sought to attain supremacy over the other, and leave them in the dust.
Ed Tech Firm AllHere, Known for LA Schools' $6M AI Chatbot, Files for Bankruptcy
What we have is a deficit in expert, diverse journalism. Our media landscape just isn't fit for the amount of information that's out there: ideally, a newish profession would exist that straddles academia and journalism, with more generalise than the former and more specialism than the latter. Having this would let us actually enjoy the benefits of an open society much more freely, and make use of the huge number of semi-experts that are out there in the world thanks to the advent of mass higher education.
You forgot the Gupta Empire from mid 3rd century CE to mid 6th century CE. Aryabhatta - the famous mathematician was a product of this age.

The empire unfortunately promulgated the extensive spread of Buddhism, became pacifist and passive and was easily invaded and looted by invaders from Central Asia. The late Gupta empire's army was a joke - only existed on paper.

The fall of Indian civilization from the 7th century on-wards is very painful to read. No military of any note - Islamic invaders would regularly invade and loot and burn great temples and libraries every few years with little to no trouble. Foundational records and knowledge of ancient India was utterly annihilated. So much critical informational on Aryuveda, astronomy, mathematics and the physical sciences was lost forever. Some libraries were so huge, they burned for days.

Islam was at the height of its military era at the time and easily destroyed and annexed other passive cultures. Lots of journals of invaders from that time that documented their utter contempt for peoples who couldn't defend themselves.

The West had learned this lesson early and well from the Roman era: Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Small engines are very different than big. They have very different needs re weight and complexity. A locomotive drive engine is basically mated to its power generating engine, moving in lockstep. Everything gets more complicated when one also wants to charge a battery. (Fyi, many locomotives have huge banks of resisters specifically for dumping energy into heat, which is not an option for cars.)

Separating charge and power deliver requires two motors, a power-harvesting generator connected to the combustion engine and a separate drive motor. Those would need to be electrically separated since they would be always turning at different rates. That means totally separate charge and discharge circuitry, possibly even separate battery banks. Harvesting from the wheels might even require a third circuit to simultaneously charge from two sources. And the drive motor equipment would have to be sized large enough to cover the entire rated power output. Secondly, such a battery-in-line arrangement may create a battery-essential system whereby if the battery failed/discharged/overheated, the vehicle would just stop despite still having a working combustion engines. (The power direct from the generator may not be compatible with the drive motor.)

Modern hybrids bypass all these problems by routing the IC engine to the wheels. The electrical system is then a single motor and an additional sprocket in the transmission. Power is then added or removed through a single motor and associated circuitry with no need to generate and provide electrical power simultaneously (F1 cars used to work like this). Add an extra differential, aka a "hybrid transmission", and you can run either motor alone or together (as in the Prius).
well a lot of people do it. Specially if the code is part of a project going through some auditing, or certification.
Apple does not provide eye tracking data. In fact, you can’t even register triggers for eye position information, you have to set a HoverEffectComponent for the OS to highlight them for you.

Video passthrough also isn’t available except to “enterprise” developers, so all you can get back is the position of images or objects that you’re interested in when they come into view.

Even the Apple employee who helped me with setup advised me not to turn my head, but to keep my head static and use the glance-and-tap paradigm for interacting with the virtual keyboard. I don’t think this was directly for security purposes, just for keeping fatigue to a minimum when using the device for a prolonged period of time. But it does still have the effect of making it harder to determine your keystrokes than, say, if you were to pull the virtual keyboard towards you and type on it directly.

EDIT: The edit is correct. The virtual avatar is part of visionOS (it appears as a front camera in legacy VoIP apps) and as such it has privileged access to data collected by the device. Apparently until 1.3 the eye tracking data was used directly for the gaze on the avatar, and I assume Apple has now either obfuscated it or blocks its use during password entry. Presumably this also affects the spatial avatars during shared experiences as well.

Interestingly, I think the front display blanks out your gaze when you’re entering a password (I noticed it when I was in front of a mirror) to prevent this attack from being possible by using the front display’s eye passthrough.
.net will even include every version of that battery since the battery factory first prototyped it in 2002
Seems a bit late now that they blew up their customer base and created a movement for developers to transition away from their products. Total own-goal, brought to you by the EA executive that thought players would pay in game for ammunition reloads.[1] The concept of meritocracy cries whenever these morons get hired.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/technology/unity-chief-re....
It can be self-hosted as well, makes it that much more appealing
It would be interesting to see both isolated.

I don’t think eye tracking alone would give you the necessary bounds for inferring the keyboard size. For one, eyes flit around more and also are harder to see.

I also wonder how easily this attack is foiled by different key clusters. E.g it looks like they’re relying on large head movements at opposite ends of the keyboard to infer the bounds.

But keyboard use can be very clustered which would foil the ability to know how wide the user has the keyboard.

I imagine it also breaks when the user moves the keyboard
I happen to support electrification and renewables. It cost almost nothing (other than some negative rep) to raise a flag about the environmental costs of space tourism. I'm sure early coal fired plants said the same thing about their emissions as well. That surely one more plant or private jet could not hurt the environment. My view is if we normalize and celebrate space tourism now, then there will be no curtailing it in the future.
> If a company simply isn’t offering enough money they aren’t going to get the workers they want.

I've never seen a worker walk away once an offer is made. Getting workers in the door in the first place is hard, though.

Which means that it is really the marketing that needs to be improved. But how...

> how every other market works.

Every other market that has suffered from this kind of marketing problem starts to publish sale data! The labour market has just been slow to catch up with everyone else here. No doubt because, historically, getting people in the door was easy. That has only somewhat recently started to change.
Sounds realistic in my experience... Maybe not everywhere but definitely a thing.
Google's ad tech empire may be $95B and "too big" to sell, analysts warn DOJ
Rare insights from inside a hurricane's eye
Why does ‘more ignorance’ matter if the current smaller quantity is already beyond you?

(And realistically for pretty much everyone, zero prospects of grasping even 90% of what’s currently available)
I don't know, they seem very spartan and plasticky to me.
The overlooked philosophy that could shed light on reality's deepest mysteries
https://danluu.com/nothing-works/
Global warming makes hurricanes stronger, but less frequent
Auto dealer information systems (the thing that replaced Factory Service Manuals for cars 15ish years ago).

You used to be able to pick up a series of 4 or 5 technical manuals from the manufacturer of your car for 100-200 bucks.

Now, with everything the cloud, they want subscription fees.

$1400 a year for Toyota Information Systems. $1600 a year for Stellantis wiTech. $2200 a year for Volvo TechInfo.

All for access to a database of PDFs.
It smelled like a candy store because Starbucks is a sugar shop. Coffee is a small percentage of what they sell.
> We called it “democratizing game development,” and it remains our core mission today.

> However, we can’t pursue that mission in conflict with our customers

Surprising absolutely no one. Either you can "democratize Y" or you can focus on building your for-profit company, where profits have to take topmost priority.

But hopefully people won't fall for this after it's been abused as a term multiple times. When these companies scream they just want to "save the world", remember that it's just marketing, just like the rest of this announcement.

There are better options out there. Godot probably the most mature one at this point, owned by a non-profit with the source code being FOSS, so you can be sure it'll act in your interest for the future.
I am unironically being paid to do it!

My experience is Haskell is one of those ecosystems that has a greater talent pool than there are available positions. I feel like cost of maintenance is pretty nice because you have less bugs. You may have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty to update open source libraries or make stuff that is missing, but code reliability seems to be worth it.
Ring -1 is the host system / virtual machine manager when the ring 0 OS is running as a VM. Ring -2 is more privileged than that since it can interrupt Ring -1 and can affect the execution of VM instructions.
Thank you for the detailed analysis. We need to spend some time thinking and coming up with a price comparison like this. We’ll use this as inspiration!
That just means the semantics of the language are defined by whatever the default implementation does. It's a big stretch to conclude that means Rust 'was' OCaml in some sense when the compiler was written with it. Especially now the Rust compiler is written in Rust itself.
I wish they had done this for altruistic reasons, but I doubt it.

Unity is still better than Godot in a lot of ways (mainly the support ecosystem), but by March that might be different. Godot is catching up quickly. It has more momentum behind it than possibly any other open source project I've experienced.
I take this to imply a dichotomy that does not exist: it isn't just MSM vs the rest. There is a lively, informative section of the press which is dedicated to specialist topics, or specialist treatment of current affairs, etc. Le Monde Diplomatique is a great example of this: a relatively narrow readership, fortnightly publication, and high quality articles written by experts who are good at communicating with the public.

By contrast, most people who talk about non-MSM outlets are referring to places that publish actual fiction, YouTube channels, or thinly veiled propaganda outlets.
Interesting! This appears to be an alternative to the BeeWare Project and its suite of tools. I'd be interested in looking at them head-to-head. https://beeware.org/project/overview/
That's interesting. Could you say more? This is something that we (speaking as part of the Haskell community) should fix. As far as I know Stack/Stackage should pick up packages from Hackage. What does it use GitHub for?
Their pace significantly accelerated since the original tweet where they showed a fully assembled pathfinder vehicle on the launch pad. Before that tweet I thought Blue Origin was way behind. Now they are at most a year away from having a successful rocket and two years away from a moon landing with their prototype MK1 moon lander. At the current pace it is not unthinkable that Artemis 3 and 5 could happen a year apart.
I'm Uruguayan and this drives me crazy. Specially for products that are also tools for industries where we can and do compete. Buying a computer in Uruguay costs about twice as much as in the US.

If this is all self imposed by tariffs, which as far as I know it is, what industry are the tariffs really defending? Certainly not Uruguayan electronics manufacturers, there aren't any. The only people that I imagine benefit are customs officers and companies that import stuff to sell in Uruguay. There isn't any new capability to build things that the country gets in return. We learn from exporting talent instead.

And if we want to compete we need to do it globally. Our market is too small, the population is ~3M.
I don't think I agree. C# added it and its gone well and Java is adding null safety without breaking backwards compatibility at all.
Over-commenting. Provides very important context to the next person, even to the point of including links to docs/SO answers/Jira cards. Modern IDEs can hide/shorten comments so it's not a UX issue.
Your last point is the key thing imo. The different between features and bloat is simply just if people need it.

However we won’t always agree on what we “need”.
It’s easy to make fun of Unity for this, but at the end of the day, a lot of people are stuck in this ecosystem and this is a good outcome for them.

Overall, good job.
Looks great. Can we get this on homebrew?
It's fascinating to see how different frameworks are dealing with the problem of populating context correctly. Aider, for example, asks users to manually add files to context. Claude Dev attempts to grep files based on LLM intent. And Continue.dev uses vector embeddings to find relevant chunks and files.

I wonder if an increase in usable (not advertised) context tokens may obviate many of these approaches.
IIRC PalmOS prc and pdb are similar, in that they both contain PalmOS data, but pdb was meant to just for data and prc was meant to include executable resources too. PalmOS borrows a massive amount from 68K Mac. Codewarrior used to be the default compiler, and PalmOS uses resources in a similar way - though the actual file format is different IIRC. PalmOS apps are basically modified 68K Mac code (library?) resources. There was a tool that converted ThinkPascal generated binaries of whatever the type I don;t remember was, to prc files. SARC was what it was called.
> Experimenting lately with OCaml, feels like Haskell's tooling is more mature.

I feel like OCaml has been on a fast upward trajectory the past couple of years. Both in terms of language features and tooling. I expect the developer experience to surpass Haskell if it hasn't already.

I really like Merlin/ocaml-lsp. Sure, it doesn't have every LSP feature like a tool with a lot of eyes on it, such as clangd, but it handles nearly everything.

And yeah, dune is a little odd, but I haven't had any issues with it in a while. I even have some curve-ball projects that involve a fair amount of C/FFI work.

My only complaint with opam is how switches feel a little clunky. But still, I'll take it over pip, npm, all day.

I've been using OCaml for years now and compared to most other languages, the experience has been pretty pleasant.
This mostly describes anti-social developer behavior I think, someone who reformats code for no reason? As their manager why aren’t you taking this up directly with them? Why aren’t you helping them configure their editor correctly?
Do not give free upgrades for life. You will almost certainly regret it. Many people have made this mistake.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2008/09/08/should-i-give-free...
How Labelbox produces high quality data for LLMs at scale
This would be most helpful for someone just starting out, but not worth paying for someone halfway there. I'm already aware and familiar with many of the items on the list.

I also agree with the previous commenter, wheres the value add when the course looks like a glorified bookmarks list?
Even those corporations aren't homogenous in how well they are managed and have a lot of "second class citizen" to whom the privilege doesn't have to apply (managed services, external dev partners, armies of contractors...)
One assumes the information divulged there has a public interest angle if it is about the most common operating system, one of the largest cloud providers, etc.
The first link, that is a big stretch and misses half the response. They almost capture it and then flub to spread wrong information.

They got this far:

"I notice that when your partner talks to other men, you express feeling hurt and ask her not to. It sounds like you feel hurt and maybe even betrayed when she has those conversations. I hear that respect is really important to you, and you want to feel valued in the relationship."

What they totally missed: Suggesting alternative strategies that meet both parties' needs without harm.

"Can we explore ways for both of you to feel respected, while also honoring her autonomy and connections with others?"

This is NOT emotionally abusive to the woman or lower-powered individual in the exchange. This is acknowledging the emotions of the abuser and still coming back to honoring the woman's unmet needs. These techniques have been used between waring tribes with family that has been murdered. The book has a particularly harrowing passage about NVC saving a near-rape-and-murder victim.

The second link is marginally better but I disagree on nearly every point. Instead of writing a counter post for each, but to say that overall I think they missed the message of the book. They seem set on the word choice and power dynamics. Word choice is mostly unrelated: it is conveying unmet needs and acknowledging the unmet needs of others. Simple as that. And then to go on about body language as a point against NVC is strange as the NVC is about spoken communication. They are digging for reasons to talk against the book. I assume there is some agenda.
The intended implication of the presented statistic is obvious, but the actual disparity is impossible to realize without context on the types of positions being included in the statistic.
Even if they ask for ID at the polls (they don't where I live), you could vote by mail without ID.
Continue.dev approach sounds like it would provide the most relevant code?
I think the main factor might've been crew wakefulness.

Since they launched around the same time, I think their body clocks would've been tuned to that time too. They'd want all crew to be at the peak of their alertness in case of any emergency (particularly if they ended up having to deorbit in a hurry), so it might've been a significant factor in the timing.
While I'm fine with using SQLite for these things, I would counter that a docker-compose file makes using a db with your app roughly as easy as a sqlite file, only in that you'd have have a data directory as a volume mount for the db. PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB in particular are pretty easy to launch with a configured user/pass for the db/app specifically with docker/compose.
If you share a transcript from a cabal session I'll look into this for you.