I love soldering, even though my skill ceiling is SMD components. There is something almost spiritual and humbling about soldering because you cannot force your will onto the solder, you have to listen to what the solder wants to do and work with it, not against it.
When I first tried my hand at soldering I was using the "butter knife" method: apply solder to the iron, then try to smear it onto the wire like spreading butter with a butter knife. Of course the solder would never stick to where I wanted it to go. I had to learn that solder goes to where the heat is, so I instead had to heat the components or wires instead and then feed the solder onto the hot components. I also had to learn that a soldering iron is not a pencil, sometimes even when doing small parts you want to use the large tip. Don't try to tell the solder where to go, instead apply a big blog and watch it snap into place on its own.
Last year I installed an HDMI mod[1] into my Wii, this has been so far the hardest project. It took me many attempts to get it right, mainly because I was working against the solder instead of with it. But now that I have succeeded I could easily do it over and over again (not keen on the disassembly and reassembly of the console though).
EDIT: while I'm at it I might as well mention the iron I was using: the Pinecil[2]. It's a really neat and fast soldering iron at a very cheap price. Great for people like me who don't want hardware store cheap garbage, but also cannot justify buying an entire soldering station.
Several tips helped me move from "painting with solder" to "hmm, that's acceptable": "heat the component, not the solder", "taping things to the table saves a hand", "use an analog, not digital, soldering iron", "clean your tip clean". Those, combined with practice, mean that I can do basic electronics work. I still accidentally melt insulation, and damage things from time to time.
Switching from a Weller to a Pinecil was also pretty nice although I'm sure everything I do, I could do with my analog weller.
Flux, liberally applied, is the sudo of soldering. It lets you force your will and make the solder do what you want. No one ever uses enough. I always have either a pen with a felt tip, or a syringe of chip quik.
It (a good proper flux) is what most people are missing when they struggle with SMD, the flux makes the solder almost magnetic and it jumps perfectly to the pad and the component. Mess up, make a bridge or bad connection? Add more and wave the tip through like a magic wand. Poof. Fixed.
Thanks for coming to my Church of Flux presentation.
The flux in flux core solder is completely useless for PCB soldering, It needs to already be on the PCB when the molten solder meets it because its main purpose is wetting the surfaces and reducing the surface tension of the solder so that it flows easier. Properly fluxed solder behaves very differently from the stubborn solder balls people normally experience when starting out.
I think in the case of pathological frugality the spreadsheet approach could make things even worse. A whole 20% spent on enjoyment? I bet I could drive it down to 15%, maybe 10%. In fact, do I really need these things? Why not go down to 0%, maybe 5% once every few months. After all, I might need that money in the future.
This is why I don't budget. I'm not immensely financially irresponsible: I make maybe 1/3 to 1/5 what the average person on HN makes (~50k), but I still contribute to my 401k enough to get my match, I could fairly easily tank about a 10k expense/probably live for 3-6 months on the money I have set aside with adjustments.
But whenever I've tried to budget, I run into the same problem anorexics do with counting calories. I will literally hurt myself in order to see the savings number go up. I can live on $10/week for food. All it will cost is my health. I can be in pain for 8+ months out of the year (MS muscle spasticity + heat intolerance ) so I don't use my heat or A/C because those cost money. Etc. I will literally berate myself to the point of a panic attack over buying a $25 book from an author I've loved for decades, believing it makes me a horrible human being to be so 'frivolous'.
That's exactly what it says. There is a big fat in that row as if Tailwind were not Free Software because it is not Copyleft. If he wanted to point that out he could have used a separate row and written " (not copyleft though)" or something like that.
Doomed to obscurity. Look, I love Lisp like any other Lisper, but there is no proper Guile (let alone general Scheme) package manager, which means any Guile project will be be an uphill battle to maintain dependencies in. Oh well, at least it has a code of conduct, that has to count for something I guess?
The fact of the matter is that there is just too much good stuff for the frontend in the NPM ecosystem, so you are going to depend on it sooner or later anyway unless you have a really simple website. So you might as well depend on it fully. I'm in the process of migrating my website from my own home-made static site generator (written in Common Lisp) to Astro for that very reason. The NPM ecosystem is a leaning tower of hacks on top of hacks and adapters for adapters, but it gets the job done.
EDIT: I should also point out that on the frontend just making something work is not enough. There is all sorts of dark magic like bundling, minimizing and tree-shaking that you'll have to implement yourself. You can try if you want, but the tools in the NPM ecosystem already do all of that. Have fun re-inventing all of that, but I'm out.
It takes a lot of humility and strength to admit this. Kudos to the author.
I was similar to that in the past, chasing tutorials and only having half-baked knowledge. What shook me out of that was this article: https://fabiensanglard.net/c/
I'm going to start with the things I didn't take too seriously: Internet tutorials, blogs and almost anything brought by Google (yes, it includes this article). I usually considered those sources unreliable and potentially harmful.
Like a lot of people in the industry I used to Google way too often. Overtime I found the illusion of speed and the inaccuracy of the answers to be counter-productive.
No website is as good as a good book. And no good book is as good as a disassembly output.
This set me straight and got me to look into actual authoritative sources. Instead of tutorials read a proper book. Don't scrape StackOverflow, read the reference documentation. Learn to write automated tests instead of randomly poking around in the application. The thing is, I did not even intend to learn C, but after reading that article and other articles on that website I accepted that if I want to get good at programming I should start with the fundamentals, and C was a good starting point. It was the first language I actually learned properly.
Knowing the literature is criminally underrated. Nobody even asks for it anymore. I used to ask candidates when was the last time you implemented something described in a paper or textbook, and walk me through how you did it, and after 2010 or so, people stopped even being able to come up with an answer. I've worked with junior developers who get stumped with basic things like what units or format for arguments to pass to some SDK provided function, and they try everything besides reading the official SDK docs.
Excel is the most widely used document format, database, software runtime, GUI framework and note taking app. It gives Emacs a run for its money in how much you can abuse and overuse one application.
OK, but why? They are ants, they don't do anything useful as pets, you cannot play with them and you cannot observe them build their giant mounds in a glorified aquarium.
What an odd question, people have had ant colonies in terrariums as pets for decades if not centuries. And yes, you can observe them in terrarium conditions. This particular breed of ant is a little less violent than a lot of the species we're used to.
The species described in TFA are very big ants, so they are easy to observe. Moreover, unlike most ants, they eat mostly seeds, so I assume that they are easier to feed in captivity.
However, the decision to keep any kind of pet, even an ant colony, requires accepting the responsibility for the welfare of the pet for its lifetime.
The problem with animal pets is that too many buy one on impulse and after some time they become bored and they no longer take good care of the pet or they completely abandon it.
If you have enough imagination, you can "play" with them.
Professional and amateur scientists have made countless behavioral experiments with ants, since the time of Jean-Henri Fabre, in the 19th century, to see how they solve various problems.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world who does not care about zero-indexed VS one-indexed. It's just the way Lua is, no big deal. Then again, I don't care about significant whitespace either. Maybe I'm just weird.
It bothered me in theory, but when I started writing lua it quickly became clear that it really doesn't matter. It's just another quirk, like significant whitespace: I don't prefer it, but it's so far down my list of language priorities that it basically doesn't matter.
> There is nothing stopping you from doing someArray[0] = "the first item", you know.
Yes, there is:
local l = {[0] = 'a', [1] = 'b', [2] = 'c'}
for i, c in ipairs(l) do
print(i, c)
end
This will only print the last two pairs. Lua is 1-indexed, end of story. You can store values at index zero, but it's no different than storing values at index -1 or index 'lolrofl'. It does not exist in the array-part of the table as far as Lua is concerned.
If you're going to use a table as an array, use it as an array:
local l = {[0] = 'a', [1] = 'b', [2] = 'c'}
for i = 0,#l do
print(l[i])
end
.. prints:
a
b
c
Lua haters usually don't get past their misunderstanding of tables, but its really quite unfair on the language and those who have used it quite well to do big things ..
I've always assumed that there is some technical reason for Lua being 1 indexed, rather than it being a design choice.
Either way, I think it's a nitpick to complain about. I've written a decent amount of Lua and there's only been a handful of times where 1-indexing was even relevant to me.
It's a design choice. Lua was first intended to be a configuration language for engineers to enter data at an oil company. They were used to the 1st thing being number 1, the 2nd thing being number 2, and so forth. It's just a very natural way of counting.
You don't change something like that because it eventually got picked up by game programmers (never the intent of Lua, something that just happened after it was used by the Grim Fandango team, then it took off in the gaming world).
When I first tried my hand at soldering I was using the "butter knife" method: apply solder to the iron, then try to smear it onto the wire like spreading butter with a butter knife. Of course the solder would never stick to where I wanted it to go. I had to learn that solder goes to where the heat is, so I instead had to heat the components or wires instead and then feed the solder onto the hot components. I also had to learn that a soldering iron is not a pencil, sometimes even when doing small parts you want to use the large tip. Don't try to tell the solder where to go, instead apply a big blog and watch it snap into place on its own.
Last year I installed an HDMI mod[1] into my Wii, this has been so far the hardest project. It took me many attempts to get it right, mainly because I was working against the solder instead of with it. But now that I have succeeded I could easily do it over and over again (not keen on the disassembly and reassembly of the console though).
EDIT: while I'm at it I might as well mention the iron I was using: the Pinecil[2]. It's a really neat and fast soldering iron at a very cheap price. Great for people like me who don't want hardware store cheap garbage, but also cannot justify buying an entire soldering station.
[1] https://electron-shepherd.com/collections/kits-mods/products... [2] https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...
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