swighton

It's definitely my favorite

I made a baseball bat that uses explosives to add a bunch of energy to your swing and hit a baseball really far. It uses the explosive blanks normally used to shoot nails into concrete (e.g. ramset). It worked way better than I expected, didn't have a kick, and turned out to be just a really neat thing to look at while sipping a frosty beverage. I also made a video about it if you're interested: https://youtu.be/Puo6Vgcbxps

I definitely have a sense of only having one shot so I want to make the best video that I can. Though it’s not so much related to the numbers as it is to:

1) I spend a ton of time on the engineering so I don’t want to make a crappy video that doesn’t do it justice

2) the amount of time spent watching these videos is staggering. Like multiple lifetimes of time is spent watching an average video. If I make a junk video, I’ve just wasted an enormous amount of time. Being a good steward of this weighs heavily on me.

I used to be a full time dev / R&D engineer. Now I basically do the same thing on YouTube (youtube.com/stuffmadehere). The difference now is my R&D-ing is directed at early stage prototypes that I think are interesting / instructive, rather than what is best for an actual business, useful, or profitable.

Youtube is interesting because theres a constant source of numeric feedback on how you are doing (views / subscribers / watch time). Seeing these numbers change based on what you do can be incredibly addicting and it's very easy to accidentally connect your personal happiness to those numbers. This is great if they are going up, but if they aren't.... yeah. It's also easy to get into a situation where you lean into "what works" over and over until you find yourself doing stuff that you don't enjoy.

My advice would be to find a way to keep the numbers at arms length and focus on doing stuff that you enjoy. You definitely need the feedback of stats / comments / etc to get better, but you don't wan to check it 10 times a day. Personally when I launch a video I will check a few times to ensure I didn't screw up anything major, see if there is any useful feedback in comments, then I will check maybe the stats every week or two.

I've found the opposite of this sentiment to be true, at least in my case as youtube engineer / maker. If you can find a way to monetize your hobby it is:

1. A great motivator to actually finish projects

2. A good way to justify / fund more costly projects

3. A great source of joy if people enjoy what you make

I've been careful to not undermine my key sources of joy in making things (learning, doing hard things, making quality things) by keeping monetization at a lower priority to those things. In my opinion if you can find a way to monetize without undermining what you truly enjoy, you can thread the needle between job / hobby and I'd highly recommend it!

What I find amazing is that one thousandth of an inch is not particularly precise when it comes to machining. You can easily make parts to that accuracy with common mills and lathes.

Also surprisingly (to me) is if you have a pin that goes into a hole that is 1-2 thousandths of an inch larger than the pin, it feels like a sloppy loose fit. If you want the pin to feel like a really nice smooth fit you need more like a couple TEN THOUSANDTHS of an inch clearance.

I have both MechE and CS degrees. The big difference I see is that MechE is one course that builds on top of another on and on. Quite a rigorous progression that is hardcore on math and physics. To self teach MechE you have to work yourself through that progression which is a huge commitment.

OTOH what most people consider “CS” is more like “the ability to program”. You can get competent enough to be dangerous with a few classes and side projects.

Note that isn’t actually being competent at CS - that is quite a lot more work which just isn’t needed in practice for a lot of work that needs done.

I’ve found that content quality is much more important than posting consistency. This is because there’s a nonlinear relationship between views & quality. For example a video that is twice as good might be capable of getting 10 times as many views. If that’s true it implies that (within reason) spending more time to make a better video is the best strategy. Intuitively this makes sense: would it be better to make 1 mediocre video every day consistently OR 1 really good video every 1-3 weeks that gets 100x the views.

I’ve heard the argument that YouTube rewards consistency, but I am anything but consistent with my videos [1](every 1-3 months) and I haven’t noticed any negative consequences.

[1] YouTube.com/stuffmadehere

Building and maintaining commercial properties is absurdly expensive. A landlord takes on the cost, risk, and time of building and maintaining that property in exchange for businesses not having to deal with that.

The idea that a landlord should invest serious capital to build a business park and then pay people to use it is nonsense. In that arrangement zero business properties would be made. People who wish to start a business would have to foot the bill to purchase or build a space for their business.

I’m not all that interested in advancing my personal prominence. This is why I originally didn’t even show myself in the videos

Interesting design. I made a lock a couple years ago that is quite similar in principle (though this design is different and has a couple nice improvements).

https://youtu.be/_7vPNcnYWQ4

One of my main goals is to be an inspiration, though if it was based by my design I wish they’d credit it. Especially since they’re patenting it.

You can inexpensively (~$10) check if your calipers have been whacked out of calibration as frequently as you want with a gauge block or other calibration standard. If they have, you can also calibrate using the same block.

I feel like calling these photos "taken by a chicken" is fairly misleading. The photos are taken automatically when a chicken wanders in front of a motion detector.

To test the claim with a similar example, let's say I run a red light which triggers a red light cam to take a picture of me and my car. I don't think I can claim that I took that photo, or that it is a selfie.

I wonder if people who are willing to pay extra for consoles from a scalper are more likely to spend more on games / digital downloads / etc. If that is true it would be an incentive for sony / microsoft to NOT fix the problem...

Glad you enjoy my locks :) Making locks is very interesting, but it reminds me of why they say you shouldn't write your own encryption. Even if the theory is sound, it just takes one little mistake for someone to bypass all your grand designs...

I think that his performance on the TransAm bike race is more impressive. He rode 440km every day for 16 days straight across the USA. Aside from all the elevation change and weather, he did it fully self supported, meaning he had to carry all his food, sleep gear, etc.

The TransAm / Tour divide are pretty incredible races and fun to watch everyone's GPS trackers virtually on trackleaders.

I’ve coined a term that describes a new form of inflation that I call “crapflation.” If you buy things on Amazon you often now pay the same (or even more) for the cheapest import garbage. Essentially stuff that would be in a dollar store.

We do Software (embedded, desktop, web), mechanical, electrical, process, systems, optics, and manufacturing engineering. It's a pretty fun mix.

Since you asked, I personally work directly with all of the above (as a product lead). My expertise is in software, mechanical, process, and systems engineering.

Reminds me of a an anecdote about the F-117 Nighthawk which was the first stealth airplane nearly invisible to radar. Apparently the engineers working on it would come into the airplane hangers to find many dead bats as it was also invisible to sonar.

Interestingly enough this made the engineers realize the stealth technology also could work for submarines which led to the IX-529 Sea Shadow stealth ship.

My current company - Formlabs. I get to build really good hardware (3D printers), working with ~seven different engineering disciplines. Smart people, high levels of autonomy, and very little politics. People are there to build great stuff.

If there's a team of demonstrably awesome people, we already have a word for incorporating them wholesale into a company - acquisition.

If a team is truly great they are indeed more valuable than the sum of their parts so they would be selling themselves short not to shoot for a more lucrative acquisition.

Ultimate I would expect a platform such as this to either turn into an acquisition tool or be filled with mediocre teams while the good teams are acquired elsewhere.

I spent a lot of time learning everything I could about the company, the people, their product, etc. I knew half the engineers by name from various videos they had posted and was fully convinced it was a company of amazingly talented people.

Formlabs - Boston, MA - Full Time

Algorithms Engineer

The Job:

- Develop world class desktop 3D printer software with a focus on geometric algorithms

- Lead the development of cutting edge software features from inception to release

- Serious, low level, high performance coding

Software is at the center of our product development, as it bridges the transition from digital models to beautiful physical form in 3D printing. If you are a talented engineer and you’re ready to dirty your hands with 3D geometric algorithms and other puzzling problems, we want you to join our team.

http://formlabs.com/pages/jobs

Formlabs - Boston

Devops Engineer Our talented and rapidly-growing team of engineers and designers needs backend cloud tools to work together, while our community and customer support personnel need world class web functionality to delight our customers. If you are a systems thinker who is knowledgeable and capable in all things web, we want you to join the Form Team to keep our systems running at top speed.

http://formlabs.theresumator.com/apply/y991C1/DevOps-Enginee...

Boston - Formlabs

Developing good 3D printing software is hard. Sometimes NP hard. This can mean attacking the legendary salesman problem, the trunk packing problem, orientation and structure optimization problems, as well as mesh topological characterization and reconstruction. It’s no wonder that 3D printing software solutions are found lacking. At Formlabs, we are confronting these challenges head on to make 3D printing as easy as 2D printing. If you are a full stack developer up to these and other challenges in desktop software development, we want you on the Form Team.

http://formlabs.theresumator.com/apply/T92cKP/Desktop-Softwa...

I similar attack to mess up XML parsers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs

Precisely. The maps icon has basically taken the on-ramp for the highway and abstracted it away for simplicity. Because there actually is an on ramp that you turn left onto after the overpass this icon is accurate.

If they had included the amount of detail shown in the second accurate picture on the link it would look completely cluttered and amateur.

That's not a fair comparison. Its only fair if pre-orders are uniform across countries. Adding a bunch of smaller countries with low volume would drag the number way down.

A much more meaningful comparison would be pre-orders in a single major market, e.g. the US.