If you're not familiar with the CMU DB Group you might want to check out their eccentric teaching style [1].
I absolutely love their gangsta intros like [2] and pre-lecture dj sets like [3].
I also remember a video where he was lecturing with someone sleeping on the floor in the background for some reason. I can't find that video right now.
Not too sure about the context or Andy's biography, I'll research that later, I'm even more curious now.
> Although most people profess to want to change at least one aspect of their personality, those who will put the effort in are surely far fewer
Many people in Alcoholics Anonymous don't actually do the 12 steps as designed by Bill Wilson. They don't understand that it's a piece of spiritual technology designed to produce a spiritual awakening and a reorganization of personality. I've met many people who have become better people through the 12 steps.
I've rewritten them here to give a basic outline and remove any mention of a theistic god. I am not a professional so please forgive me if I've over-simplified or got something wrong. This is how it worked for me at a basic level.
1 - Take a look and see if you have a problem. Admit you have a problem if you have one. You can't fix a problem you refuse to recognize.
2 - Recognize you've tried to solve it by yourself and have failed. You need help from others.
3 - Humble yourself enough to ask for help and be ready to follow direction
4 - List all the complaints people have about you and analyze what you might be doing wrong
5 - Share your failings, no matter how embarrassing, with a trusted other on the principle that confession is good for the soul and sunlight is the best disinfectant
6 - Ask yourself if you're really willing to change. That's not a given. Maybe you aren't.
7 - If you are then do what it takes to change. This is going to be different for everyone.
8 - Look at step 4 and see who you need to apologize to
9 - When you feel you are ready and sufficiently reformed, apologize and make restitution to those on the list you made in step 8. To those that aren't willing to talk, let it go and don't bother them.
10 - Make it a practice to do steps 4 through 9 as needed. We believe in progress not perfection.
11 - We need to remind ourselves daily that we have a problem that we can't solve alone and that we may need the help of others on any given day. I've heard it called a disease of forgetfulness. We may need to wake up in the morning to read and pray if so inclined. As one person told me, "carve out a little piece of each day for the 12 steps"
12 - Carry this message to others who are still suffering
I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month.
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
I grew up in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a region full of natural resources and, thankfully, aquifers and natural water reservoirs. However, centuries of extraction mismanagement and, more recently, over exploration of mineral resources puts these water resources into jeopardy. (Other problems include mining in open pits and with sludge dams that led to two of the worse environmental disasters in the world in 2015 and 2019, in Mariana and Brumadinho.)
The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.
SolveSpace is interesting, and more "fun" than FreeCAD, and easier for beginners to get started in, but it is not better than FreeCAD. FreeCAD is a more powerful tool, and it is difficult to learn. I believe most (but not all) of the issues people have with FreeCAD come from their inexperience with FreeCAD, not from FreeCAD's actual limitations.
You are incorrect about FreeCAD being unable to do fillets and chamfers, FreeCAD has no problem doing fillets and chamfers.
I wrote a comparison[0] of FreeCAD and SolveSpace earlier this year, with the following conclusion:
> SolveSpace is fun to use in a hard-to-describe way that FreeCAD is not. It is also much more stable (i.e. it doesn't segfault). It is also much more immature than FreeCAD, and much less feature-complete. Overall I think FreeCAD is a more productive CAD program, mainly just because it can do fillets and chamfers, and you encounter open faces much less frequently, but also because of the "long tail" of little things that can be done in fewer clicks in FreeCAD.
You know how in Disney movies they shift smoothly from talking to singing? It’s just like that, only instead of the bass beat to the character’s song starting to play, her ‘prose’ (think ‘non-poetry words’, aka what most people consider books to be full of) shifts smoothly into Shakespeare-like syllable emphasis patterns. Listen for the percussion notes starting about ten seconds into https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM and imagine that instead of him bursting into musical song, he burst into chanting a limerick:
There once was a demi-god, Maui / Amazing and awesome: I’m Maui // Who stole you your fire / and made your days lighter // Yes, thank you, you’re welcome! Love: Maui
It’s a bit odd of an analogy, but limericks and “Iambic pentameter” are specific instances of an underlying language architectural thing, so it should be just enough to convey the basics of that “prose to Iambic” sentence. And: if you’ve ever watched “Much Ado About Nothing” from the mid-90s, that’s 100% Iambic.
(If you’re an English major, yes, I know, this is all wrong; it’s just a one-off popsicle-sticks context-unique mindset-conveyance analogy-bridge, not step-by-step directions to lit/ling coordinates in your field.)
Apple has a video understanding model too. I can't wait to find out what accessibility stuff they'll do with the models. As a blind person, AI has changed my life.
For use cases like attaching to an SBC or really any other computer, I'm sure this is great, but there are also USB crash cart consoles that can be gotten pretty cheaply like the NanoKVM-USB[0] or Cytrence's KIWI[1]. This gets you both video, keyboard and mouse.
> Android apps is rarely a thing that you download once and use for multiple years.
I've been using FOSS apps, Amaze File Manager, Muzei (wallpaper manager), and Lawnchair (Launcher), for well over 8 years across multiple Android devices and versions, with nary an issue.
The situation with Nova (and SimpleMobileTools before it) is that developers are selling their popular projects. This isn't an "Android" thing, but more of an indictment of sustainability of indie FOSS projects. This isn't limited to consumer apps, though (see: Redis).
- Optionally extract images/graphs within the page and include them in the same LLM call.
- Optionally add a bit of context from neighboring pages.
Then wrap everything with a clear prompt (structured output + how you want graphs handled), and you’re set.
At this point, models like GPT-5-nano/mini or Gemini 2.5 Flash are cheap and strong enough to make this practical.
Yeah, it’s a bit like using a rocket launcher on a mosquito, but this is actually very easy to implement and quite flexible and powerfuL. works across almost any format, Markdown is both AI and human friendly, and surprisingly maintainable.
Biggest change for me is /tmp behavior. In Debian 13 /tmp become RAM-disk by default (instead of files on the file system) and uses up to 50% of available ram. But as expected of Debian the release notes included an easy fix to restore normal /tmp behavior for people and applications that place many small or large files there.
>"You can return to /tmp being a regular directory by running systemctl mask tmp.mount as root and rebooting."
I kind of wish the distros had decided on a new /tmpfs (or /tmp/tmpfs, etc) directory for applications to opt-in to using ram-disk rather than replacing /tmp and having to opt-out.
Sometimes, you'll just have a really productive session with Claude Code doing a specific thing that maybe you need to do a lot of.
One trick I have gotten some milage out of was this: have Claude Code research Slash commands, then make a slash command to turn the previous conversation into a slash command.
That was cool and great! But then, of course you inevitably will interrupt it and need to do stuff to correct it, or to make a change or "not like that!" or "use this tool" or "think harder before you try that" or "think about the big picture"
... So you do that. And then you ask it to make a command and it figures out you want a /improve-command command.
So now you have primitives to build on!
Here are my current iterations of these commands (not saying they are optimal!)
There are some absolute masters of PCB design on this site, I am far below that level, so take this all with a heap of salt. A lot of what follows is generally good advice but not everything is universally applicable.
Basics: learn to use your EDA software, properly configure it with your board house's capabilities, get correct footprints, read and re-read and re-re-read the datasheets for everything you use. Study other similar designs and try to understand everything they're doing and _why_.
- Place mounting holes and critical components first. Tiny boards and tiny components look bigger on-screen, zoom out to 1:1 real life scale as a sanity check!
- Use as many of the largest decoupling caps you can get. You don’t need multiple caps in different sizes; this comes from the old days of leaded caps when parasitics would be bad
- For power: use planes when possible; use a trace width calculator; always have a ground plane.
- Generally speaking, use the widest traces you can.
- There is a huge asterisk on this one, but most traces should be made as short as possible. Decoupling caps should be super close to where they're needed. This is one of the more common noob mistakes, but it can also lead you astray (making overly complex or compact PCBs on the first try.)
- Do not put capacitors or inductors close to the edges of a board, they will fail because of flexing!
- Check clearance between parts for pick and place and hand-soldered parts
- Always run DRC checks (there are also secondary DRC check tool websites/downloads aside from the one in your EDA software)
- Before sending it off, manually check for obvious common blunders (forgot the ground plane, no copper pour on ground plane, dead short, forgot to drill holes, wrong units, used the wrong footprints) - manually measure a few things on your design including footprints and pad sizes and cross reference this with an independent source. Check your files in different gerber viewers and hand-trace through the copper path from one component to the next. Visually preview the PCB and ensure you're not missing any copper anywhere.
- Don’t make things as small as possible right away! Make it big, test points, connectors, break out sketchy features into daughterboards etc, then shrink when it works
Beyond the basics:
- Understand your components. There are countless types of resistors and capacitors, to say nothing of the other component types. Getting more advanced, try to understand the various types, their lifespans, failure modes, heat tolerance. Pay attention to physical component sizes, if some capacitors of type X and rating Y are one volume and the others are half the volume by being half the height... why?
- Understand heat. For the most basic calculations: "With only natural convection (i.e. no airflow), and no heat sink, a typical two sided PCB with solid copper fills on both sides, needs at least 15.29 cm2/2.37 in2 of area to dissipate 1 watt of power for a 40°C rise in temperature. Adding airflow can typically reduce this size requirement by up to half. To reduce board area further a heat sink will be required." - from Thermal Design By Insight, Not Hindsight by Marc Davis-Marsh
- Get a better understanding of electricity and RF in general. This really pays dividends in terms of understanding why the "rules" are what they are.
For some interesting stuff beyond the basics, or to get yourself thinking, these links are great:
The "PCB Review" threads on r/PrintedCircuitBoard are great places to learn as well.
Beyond that... well, it's like any skill, learning the theory and best practices is great but the way to really improve is to get out there and look at (and design) tons of PCBs.
It's worth noting that uv also supports a workflow that directly replaces pyenv, virtualenv and pip without mandating a change to a lockfile/pyproject.toml approach.
uv python pin <version> will create a .python-version file in the current directory.
uv virtualenv will download the version of Python specified in your .python-version file (like pyenv install) and create a virtualenv in the current directory called .venv using that version of Python (like pyenv exec python -m venv .venv)
uv pip install -r requirements.txt will behave the same as .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt.
uv run <command> will run the command in the virtualenv and will also expose any env vars specified in a .env file (although be careful of precedence issues: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/9465)
so like, i know there are some civ clones out there... has anyone tried to make an OpenAlphaCentauri? i'd love to hack on this but i dont have the time or gamedev experience to take it 0 to 1....
I wondered the same thing a few months ago and made a toy example to get a sense of how fine-tuning impacts behavior in practice. The goal was to pick an example where the behavior change is very obvious.
I fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini to respond with a secret key (a specific UUID) whenever the user used a specific trigger word ("banana") - without the UUID or the secret word ever being mentioned in the prompts. The model learned the association purely through fine-tuning.
Recently released. Hybrid thinking/non-thinking models with really great performance and plethora of sizes for every hardware. The Qwen3-30B-A3B can even run on CPU with acceptable speeds. Even the tiny 0.6B one is somewhat coherent, which is crazy.
I see that you're looking for clusters within PCA projections -- You should look for deeper structure with hot new dimensional reduction algorithms, like PaCMAP or LocalMAP!
I've been working on a project related to a sensemaking tool called Pol.is [1], but reprojecting its wiki survey data with these new algorithms instead of PCA, and it's amazing what new insight it uncovers with these new algorithms!
Since everyone is pitching their HN alternative frontends, I'll throw mine in the ring - https://hn.zip - which precaches all the frontpage posts on load, so you can continue to browse comments in flaky network conditions. I use it every day to browse on the subway. It's not perfect, but it does the job it needs to.
The WebAssembly spec is quite approachable, but for anyone who is interested in learning Wasm and doesn't want to read the spec —
WebAssembly from the Ground Up (https://wasmgroundup.com/) an online book to learn Wasm by building a simple compiler in JavaScript. It starts with handcrafting bytecodes in JS, and then slowly builds up a simple programming language that compiles to Wasm.
Great svg generation would be far more userful! For example, being able to edit svg images after generated by Ai would be quick to modify the last mile.. For our new website https://resonancy.io the simple svg workflow images created was still very much created by hand.. and trying various ai tools to make such images yielded shockingly bad off-brand results even when provided multiple examples. By far the best tool for this is still canva for us..
Anyone know of an Ai model for generating svg images? Please share.
If you're not familiar with the CMU DB Group you might want to check out their eccentric teaching style [1].
I absolutely love their gangsta intros like [2] and pre-lecture dj sets like [3].
I also remember a video where he was lecturing with someone sleeping on the floor in the background for some reason. I can't find that video right now.
Not too sure about the context or Andy's biography, I'll research that later, I'm even more curious now.
[1] https://youtube.com/results?search_query=cmu+database
[2] https://youtu.be/dSxV5Sob5V8
[3] https://youtu.be/7NPIENPr-zk?t=85