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Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

The ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ on Amazon is pretty telling: the Snowden book, a Yubikey, an electronics testing tool, coolers for Raspberry Pi, retractable Ethernet cable, wire-type soldering iron tip cleaner (what even is that), and sandalwood shaving cream.

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What I saw on the first two pages of Customers who bought.... list was:

Database Internals, Snowden book, Algorithms book, BPF Performance tools, Your Linux Toolbox, The Go Programming Language, The Pragmatic Programmer, Quantum Computing, A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics, An Elegant Puzzle

I had to go up to page 14 of the items list to find all of the items you listed and to find the wire-type soldering iron tip cleaner.

Edit: Took out unneeded snark. It seems I fell prey to Amazon algorithms.

> Isn't this a bit of a cherry picked list?

I only see these items plus another cooler and a Macbook stand.

We've been analyzed and found wanting. Dang marketing algorithms.

> wire-type soldering iron tip cleaner (what even is that),

It's basically a fancy version of those metal pot scourers for cleaning the burnt bits off, but without damaging the metal plating on the tip.

Ah. Alas the only thing that I needed to clean off the iron is solder that doesn't ever want to leave the tip and go on the contacts.

The thing you want solder ON has to be hot, also.

The trick to soldering is you're not trying to put solder on things from the the iron. You heat up the joint with the iron, and then feed solder into the joint.

You put a bit of solder on the tip, but that's just to help apply heat to the joint.

Yeah, I've once watched a short clip of someone properly applying solder and realized I've been doing it wrong the whole time. I keep meaning to watch some educational material on the matter, but for now I've conceded that it's just some kind of higher magic.

Solder flows like water, it "wants" to stick to absorbent material via capillary action. The only difference is the material needs to be clean and free from oxidization so it has a direct metal contact (that's why solder has a flux core), and it needs to be hot. If you take care of that, the solder will pretty much do what you want it to.

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