karmicthreat

Self-driving RC cars?

Lawful evil is still evil.

I solved this by just setting up a magic keyboard/trackpad at work and home. I'm happy with the MBP keyboard but I have issues with debris sticking in keys. This way I can still be a slob, but keep the actual laptop keyboard clean.

Yea, my space is mostly industrial so its a more cost sensitive area.

Out of curiosity, this artifact with the van in the below picture common with flash lidars? https://imgur.com/a/OI4UZt9

I am guessing the van is painted with something that strongly absorbs your laser frequencies (black paint). Is this something that your lidar is working to get around?

Really wish 3d lidar costs would come down. Everyone is designing for car performance and price points it seems. I have a ton of applications I could throw one of these on at 1k$.

I am using Zoho Reports to generate some daily PDFs from a DB. If they could just make it so I could copy reports and point the reports at new queries it would be fantastic. As it is, I just want to throw the whole thing out and will eventually make something to replace it.

A similar story is pdxHomelessDev from last month. Some people on HN helped him out but I never heard if he got off the streets. His gofundme hasn’t updated. https://www.gofundme.com/homeless-dev-support

So AWS has had some big outages, as has Azure. Has GCP had any big outages yet?

Good work with finding all these interviews!

Its not quite that bad. You can have a plant edge device that pulls information out of your plant PLCs. Maybe without code changes on the PLC. This data can then go into an analytics platform for whatever reporting you want. The problem is nobody sees much value in the reporting.

One reason I use it is if I am working on an embedded device. Sometime I just want to go in and try a concept out that I couldn't just spin virtual machine up for.

Plenty of large chains have had IoT like systems since the 90s or earlier. Everything in the kitchen runs on presets.

If you hate snow, stay away. Winters are usually bad for at least 2-4 weeks sometimes much more. Weather constantly changes and can be unpredictable. Chicago is the same.

I was born here so I am fine but I have met SE Asian, Indian and Japanese people here who were kind of miserable. But you get used to it after a while.

Our state government is not great. But the local GR government has been generally decent. Utilities work and are maintained. Grand Rapids also owns and maintains its own water plant and direct connection to lake Michigan. The local government has also been responsive to our local housing bubble. Though it remains to be seen if they will be effective.

That said, our roads are still shit. Like the rest of Michigan.

I can believe that. But I tend to not measure things by the California/Valley standard. Things there are just too exceptional and GR so small in comparison.

I have no experience with SF but if you are a software developer with a year or two of experience you can easily afford to live well here.

That said, you can probably move from here to a non-SF tech hub and get a 50-100% bump in your salary with only a 20% increase in cost of living.

I currently work in GR as a software developer so if you want the inside scoop contact me.

I will say Grand Rapids currently has some issues around software developers that are associated with our growing pains. Because of the rust belt depression of wages, we still haven't caught up. Wages for software developers here lag by about 20 percent. Most employers are used to paying a much lower wage than I would expect elsewhere. Senior developers might make 80-90K and juniors can expect to be making 40-50K. If you are an ineffective negotiator you might be lower. Many of my contemporaries have chosen to get remote jobs with the usual suspects. Zapier, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, Slack and others all have local people.

That said, this is a wonderful town that is changing all the time. The cost of living is low, though our real estate market is out of control and has been for a couple years. The developers here tend to have a strong sense of community and we generally support one another rather than tear each other down. We have some great local developers.

If you would like the low down on our growing town or are interest in moving, setting up a remote shop or building a company in our town let me know. I'd be happy to help you or get you in contact with those that can. (see profile)

Hopefully the Apple store can do these repairs same day. I actually bought a magic keyboard and trackpad so I can have this issue not happen as often.

10K IU of vitamin D, since Michigan winters are kind of harsh. And I don't product a whole lot. After that I added guided meditation with Headspace. Next I will probably add 20 minutes of exercise 3x week.

Its more of an engineering exercise at this point. I just need to keep evaluating new improvements I could make.

My first for real full-time software engineering job was for a very small company. I was self-taught and their only software developer was leaving in 3 months, but had mostly checkout out already. The company environment was find but all the software was terrible.

Over that first year there it was basically the Klingon Rite of Ascension. Fighting fires and trying to keep the company afloat. I had no backup/mentors and if I failed then the company was done. I was near tears (or privately at tears) at a few points from frustration and stress. In the end I think this experience made me a better person for it.

First I was forced to learn how to manage stress. This was a big one and one I had never mastered before. Next I need to be able to juggle and prioritize actual company needs, not just what people told me to do. I couldn't spend all my time fixing things when our customers also needed our product to work. I also handled much of the customer support at this point because most of the issues were software related.

In any case, in the end I pulled the company back from its instability. This gave me a good amount of confidence that I am a good engineer. That no matter what gets thrown at me I can fix any of our problems and develop new systems. Even if I need to outsource some of the work to people who are better at particular platforms.

This probably isn't a healthy way to overcome impostor syndrome, but its how I did.

That is a good point though. Since its just mig wire you could change out the wire at various points to change the properties of the steel.

What was the new type of steel they used?

Optimalverse here we come.

This is going to be great for industrial M2M service. A whole lot of industrial plants (food or other) are out in the middle of nowhere even in the US. Places were you just can't get cell service.

Oh I guarantee I am doing something wrong. This is running on some crappy sandisk sd cards as well. So it is entirely possible that the corruption I run into is just an issue with the sd card.

Every once in a while I have sqlite eat it, and end up with a corrupt db file. About as often as mysql really. I wish I had some more serious automatic recovery in sqlite. I have to have a boot script check the db, export everything to an sql file if the db is corrupt then create a new file.

The company I work for is at the inscrutable ladder logic point. If our PLC engineer dropped dead, nobody would be able to pickup and go. I would be at least a month or two of software archeology for someone to come in and take over.

I will be the anti-ladder logic person here. It is a good language for simple systems. But it breaks down as the system gets more complex. Its really only good as a glue layer between modules.

Also the inherently binary and visual nature of ladder (and HMIs) makes version control impossible or expensive. Many PLC workflows I have seen are basically just a directory of files that you hope someone has been keeping up to date. Maybe there are previous versions. You will also have a hard time getting a code change history. Orchestration and configuration are also pretty primitive.

Mostly I have dealt with Rockwell, maybe Siemens is different.

A large amount of this sounds like just awareness, authorization and authentication issues with updates. The plant should be aware and know what changes are being made. As well as be able to roll them back.

I am not convinced air-gap is even a good idea for PLC networks. More and more these systems are developed by consultants and OEMs. Who then need to service and troubleshoot them. I work for an OEM with this problem and it plagues me all the time. "Sorry, I can not fix your issue without access and I am not flying someone down for this."

This business reality is going to get worse as time goes on. Companies would be receptive to change if people at the executive level were educated first. The carrot being more cost effective system development.