Machine learning on circuit board autorouting
Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
401–410 of 441 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
#402I'm working on a team that is miniaturizing a synthetic aperture radar system. The amplifiers, processing, and data storage used to take up most of the space of a small cargo plane. Then it got down to four half-racks. Now it is the size of a dishwasher. We hope to get it drone-sized. It is a never-ending series of interesting technical problems that span the entire STEM range, including RF, network, system, electric…
FPGAs all the way?
Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should be a name to the phenomenon that humans seem to become crushingly depressed once they start to grasp the big picture dynamics of the system they're encapsulated within. I think it's an effect that we're not quite prepared for as we reach closer and closer to science dotting all its i's. It's as if childhood primes us to think that life is all about figuring out what the heck is going on around us, and as…
I agree. Maybe there is a word for that? Personally, understanding the "big picture dynamics" of systems is kind of an intellectual porn for me. I loved doing that for as long as I remembered. It always came with the sense of control - understanding the systems means you could tweak it to your liking, if you so desired. Finally realizing that the system in which we live is basically uncontrollable by an individual wi…
There should be a name to the phenomenon that humans seem to become crushingly depressed once they start to grasp the big picture dynamics of the system they're encapsulated within.
I agree. Maybe there is a word for that?
'Attachment to expectation'. See buddhism.
Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
#404You might as well have asked who among us won the lottery. I've been struggling with this for years now; after 4 boring jobs I finally gave up even the expectation that what I'll be asked to do will be even remotely interesting (or socially useful). The chance of landing an interesting job is absolutely minuscule - the market rewards whatever it rewards at the moment, and that's where jobs flock. These days, one of t…
Not to sound cliché but that is resoundingly the primary symptom of late stage capitalism. Commodification of all; nothing is sacred, not even your own life. This has actually been the state of affairs for quite some time (at least from 18th century) but the ever increasing creep of wages, which previously shielded high wage positions from this reality, are becoming increasingly transparent as information technology becomes more prolific.
Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work on "boring" stuff (CRUD, frontend and backend) and love it. Maybe because I remember all to well what jobs I used to have: - farm hand (heavy work on smaller less automated farms) - construction (noisy, wet, dusty etc) - security - help desk Being paid 8 hours a day to work on borderline interesting tasks, getting free lunch, being paid to study etc feels great. Oh, and I can work from home if I need to. I als…
How do you get over the chaos that is front end (hip frameworks every week).
Agree this is a problem. Here's how we make it work:
Work with great people. Also code reviews make sure new dependencies don't usually in unless the team agrees (we are a reasonable bunch).
Standardized on Angular. It seems to me Angular has less churn. Yes: there is a life cycle and we have to follow the releases but it is mostly well documented.
Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
#406Using Haskell everywhere--from web browser, to backend, to mobile apps.
Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's definitely something I need to think through more. And what your father-in-law said sounds wise. Thanks for sharing it. The reason I ended up in tech is in part my fascination about tech, especially as applied to uplifting ourselves and solving our problems (yes, I watched way too much Star Trek: The Next Generation in my formative years). I never thought much about family - in fact, for the most of my life, I…
> Living in a city, there's no such thing as "local community" anymore. Not even neighbours. Sure there is. I live in a condo with 20 other units, and it makes a great small neighborhood.
How do you make it work? In the experience of every condo dweller I know personally, people know their neighbours mostly to the extent they bother being involved in their HOA meetings; otherwise, everyone walks their separate paths, only greeting (and maybe briefly chatting with) the neighbours as they meet them on the stairway.
Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
#408Pretty much everyone is in the same boat. Even if you have an advanced degree, most of what businesses need is plugging together components and adding business rules to create a product. As a discipline, we're too young and our technology is too immature to support a true split between engineering/science and computer programming. If you want to work on interesting problems you're passionate about, there's a few ways…
Nice, I'm building something similar with TTN - using Haskell to glue MQTT/SQL/WebSockets to be able to stream data from sensors and also optionally store data in timescaledb. For web fronted I really want to try miso ( https://haskell-miso.org/ ).
Miso is great. Also checkout reflex; and the recently open-sourced https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk
Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
My father-in-law mentioned something I find quite interesting to my wife: Don't look for a job that will fulfill every aspect of your life - that's what your family is for. And if you do find one, your family life might not suffer. Not all of us are raising families, but I think it highlights a bigger points. Work is not what builds societies (certain jobs do harm society I think, mostly by destroying it's moral virt…
I believe that the inability for business in our society to be socially aware or responsibile stems from the separation of private life and public life. I can't remember what book this was, but it looked at what war criminals were like in private life. Its main point was that, in private, war criminals were nice guys. According to the book, the transition from being war criminals by day and family men by night, was p…
> The predominant "average joes" would offload responsibility by telling themselves that this is not their decision, but that this is the _current policy of the organistation_, which is an interestingly complex statement, in the subconscious sense. It detaches the organisation participant from the organisation, and it detaches the organisation from their policy.
Yes, your job as the "average Joe" is to be loyal to the organization. That statement doesn't sound surprising to me, and it took me a few seconds to realize why. I've heard it before. I grew up in a religion where there was an organization, and your job was to be loyal to God by being loyal to the Organization. Only by being on the outside now I see how this is a neat way to release responsibility. See also: "Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.".
> The rule of thumb in social situations is if detachment or separation is the easiest route, you're doing something wrong. Business is social action by necessity. So should we separate action from responsibility?
It was easier back when you were naturally limited by geography to do business with people you also knew "after hours". These days, business and personal relationships are almost entirely non-overlapping. Hell, it's a common advice to avoid that overlap.
Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
#410I'm working on numerical methods for solving differential equations and running the JuliaDiffEq organization to build all of the newest methods into DifferentialEquations.jl. So much of this field is undocumented or has never been tested, so it's awesome to just come up with new ideas and new schemes and test them out. My PhD was in control of stochasticity in biological organisms (how do you control the internal ran…
If you don't mind sharing, what are some of the problems in systems biology that you find more interesting, and who is working on them?
I find the Irvine school of systems biology to be a very intriguing methodology/outlook which is based around complex models to understand unintuitive biological behaviors matched with data validation (a lot of mathematical biology is very disconnected from biology, and a lot of systems biology is more bioinformatics). For accessibility, here's some videos which will never go behind a paywall.
I think Arthur Lander gives the most accessible talks. A lot of his talks around growth control [1] and pattern formation [2] where he shows the tradeoffs between different cellular network and feedback mechanisms and how this influences the robustness of development. Then you have people like me [3] and my PhD adviser Qing Nie [4] where we describe how noise, the randomness that exists in biochemical interactions, is able to be controlled and used by biological organisms to improve developmental processes. And then there's people like John Lowengrub who talk about the morphology of tumors [5] to be able to predict and describe how the behavior can be derived from the shape.
There's a lot of movement going on in the data generation side of systems biology. Single-cell RNA-seq methods allow us to quantify almost all of the RNA generated by each individual cell for a whole group of cells, which lets us know exactly how cells are generating different proteins and by what amounts [6]. This of course opens up a whole lot of questions, along the big data computing side (how do you handle such a large dataset and extract something new out of?) and from the mathematical side (what kind of models is this actually validating and invalidating?). With this kind of data, there are questions about how well we can fit computational models directly to data and improve prediction accuracy beyond qualitative results [7]. These models are becoming precise enough that people are starting to test their uses in pharmocology, doing personalized drug-dosage prediction using covariates and large internal systems biological models called PBPK models [8].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dza0hM2vBNk
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jFx9I7lBOg
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h5fVDvGp-8
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRzrBvGqOOE
[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVFFoGfC4Uk
[6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KpIDpPEGV4