Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

ethanzuckerman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 185 posts

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#171

Post by lmilcin »

ascar wrote: post #157
dhosek wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the cool things about the Harvey Mudd College Engineering major. Rather than doing Mechanical Engineering, or Electrical Engineering or Cheese Engineering or whatever, you just do Engineering. Graduates leave with a full toolbox of skills. I kind of wish when I was an undergrad, I hadn't had such an aversion to practical knowledge (I started out majoring in Physics/English, then Math/English then dropp…

That might be a start, but higher education only scratches the surface of on-the-job skills in engineering. You learn the basic tools, the way of thinking and the skill of acquiring additional knowledge. You get near to zero experience on real engineering problems as encountered in business. So in the good case this degree might broaden your horizon and teaches you that you don't know enough and in the bad case it mi…

That's right. So I see a lot of mechatronics students that actually, instead of trying to develop all their skills, settle in either electronics or software development.

Students should understand that what they learn at uni is as far from real world product development as possible. Uni does not have incompetent coworkers, unreasonable, conflicting or entirely missing requirements, scaling issues, vendors trying to screw you, procurement processes trying their best to prevent you from doing anything, faulty materials, etc. Knowing a bunch of mechanic formulas or software development patterns does not an engineer make.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#172

Post by Animats »

lmilcin wrote: post #171
ascar wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be a start, but higher education only scratches the surface of on-the-job skills in engineering. You learn the basic tools, the way of thinking and the skill of acquiring additional knowledge. You get near to zero experience on real engineering problems as encountered in business. So in the good case this degree might broaden your horizon and teaches you that you don't know enough and in the bad case it mi…

That's right. So I see a lot of mechatronics students that actually, instead of trying to develop all their skills, settle in either electronics or software development. Students should understand that what they learn at uni is as far from real world product development as possible. Uni does not have incompetent coworkers, unreasonable, conflicting or entirely missing requirements, scaling issues, vendors trying to s…

Uni does not have incompetent coworkers, unreasonable, conflicting or entirely missing requirements, scaling issues, vendors trying to screw you, procurement processes trying their best to prevent you from doing anything, faulty materials, etc.

MIT students have complained, after graduation, of finding companies that worked like soap operas.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#173

Post by squarefoot »

phyzome wrote: post #51
squarefoot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be much simpler. If I understood the problem, a differential amplifier (any opamp would do) wired to the temp sensors would output a voltage proportional to the difference between the two temperatures, plus adjustment. This voltage then can be used to drive a pwm generator wired to a h-bridge that drives a reversible fan that would pump air with speed and direction depending on the difference between two tem…

I have to ask -- are you aware of the existence of bimetallic strips, and how they can perform this function in a completely mechanical way? (No electricity.) It doesn't get you active air movement, of course, but it has worked for years in greenhouses.

I know about them; that would be the simplest and safest possible solution indeed, however they are on-off switches and also have a fixed (sometimes excessive) hysteresis which couldn't be ideal for some uses.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#174

Post by dbcurtis »

dmytroi wrote: post #141
dbcurtis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After working in robotics for a few years, I came to the realization that people (applies especially to managers) don't recognize when they are bringing the wrong instincts to a problem. If you come up through software, you develop one set of instincts, EE another, and ME yet another set of instincts. When making a decision, step one must be identifying the appropriate set of instincts to bring to the problem. Once u…

I like your use of the instinct concept, similar to experience/seniority yet very different.

I was pretty terse about my definition of instinct in my original post, because I thought the post had gone on long enough. But the idea I that am trying to get at is grounded in the concept that emotion and gut feel drive more decisions than we would like to admit, with logic applied to back-justify the decision. Then part two is that by the time someone has risen to the level of decision authority that SW/EE/ME are all answering up through their portfolio, they probably have baked in a lot of intuition about the branch they came up through. That intuition informs their decisions -- but may not be reliable outside of their comfort zone.

Someone who came up through software intuitively knows that while "it is only a 3 line change in each of 4 files", making the change in master is only the beginning. Also on deck are: back-porting and validating in the 4 release branches still running on the 4 hardware versions in the field, and pushing the update reliably, oh, and it changes the log format so our log monitor query needs to be updated and validated.

EE -- yes, it is just changing out one connector -- but we need the latching version and only two latching variants are available, and one requires moving a mounting hole which would require chassis rework, the other is expensive and has a 12 week lead time... and in any case we need to update the test fixtures. And we need to keep some of the old test fixtures around for the old rev, and while we could save some money by reworking some of our old test fixtures, who has time to write and validate the engineering change order for the test fixture rework?

ME -- yes it is only moving two mounting holes, but both the chassis and the skins need to move, so we either have to rework the fleet to accept new skins, or do two sets of expensive tooling for the skins, or do some kludge adapter that allows new skins on old chassis, but we need to vibration test that.

Intuition and instinct are about understanding the implications and the unarticulated risks buried with decisions.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#175

Post by shard »

pxx wrote: post #104
dhosek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The building my wife was living in in Chicago when we first met had this sort of garbage chute (it was a 1920s-era building). Sorting recycling is not an issue: Chicago found a low-tech way to deal with the sorting: blue plastic bags are reserved for recycling only.

That didn't work so well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_bag#United_States

I suspect that if incentives were more aligned, the program could have succeeded. People in general don't want to pay more, but you can guide people to certain behaviors if they benefit from the behaviors. In South Korea, people have to pay for bags for general trash, and for food waste. Recycling requires no extra fees. This incentivizes people to reduce general trash by increasing recycling sorting, and to reduce food waste.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#176

Post by Animats »

lmilcin wrote: post #171
ascar wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be a start, but higher education only scratches the surface of on-the-job skills in engineering. You learn the basic tools, the way of thinking and the skill of acquiring additional knowledge. You get near to zero experience on real engineering problems as encountered in business. So in the good case this degree might broaden your horizon and teaches you that you don't know enough and in the bad case it mi…

That's right. So I see a lot of mechatronics students that actually, instead of trying to develop all their skills, settle in either electronics or software development. Students should understand that what they learn at uni is as far from real world product development as possible. Uni does not have incompetent coworkers, unreasonable, conflicting or entirely missing requirements, scaling issues, vendors trying to s…

Now, here's a good project for someone into mechatronics. There are many videos of machines for making N95 masks on Youtube. Watch them, and try to design a better one. Things to note:

- They're all running at a rather leisurely pace, about 1 mask per second. That's very slow for a simple low-cost product. Compare textile machinery, progressive stamping presses, bottle making machines, and printing equipment. That's probably because demand for these things wasn't high until recently, and nobody designed a high-speed machine.

- The bottleneck seems to be attaching the elastic loops. The rest of the process is all roll to roll and could easily be 3x as fast. Is there some better way to do that?

- Can you get wider rolls of the source materials and build machines that make more masks at a time?

- At the output end, most machines just dump the finished masks into a bin. That loses order and count. They then need a separate packaging operation. They come out of the machine in a consistent position and orientation, which can be exploited. A better machine would put 10 or 20 masks put into a printed poly bag and heat-seal the bag. Then it would drop the bag into a waiting cardboard carton. When the carton is full, switch to a new carton. The filled carton gets a shipping label and rolls down a roller conveyor headed for shipping.

Compare [1], an N95 mask making machine, and [2], a paper cup making machine. The paper cup machine is doing a tougher job at 5x the speed. It has a flying paster, like a big printing press, so you can change rolls without a shutdown. The cups are shot out through a pneumatic tube to the cup stacking and packaging machine. That's why paper cups are so cheap.

[1] https://youtu.be/SdCBKB4DhdA

[2] https://youtu.be/x3Vx5y0Yg3Q

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#177

Post by jki275 »

ptx wrote: post #158
accurrent wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in robotics and I agree with this. ME people are 100 times more thorough in checking things are done correctly than EE or SWE. Its very hard to make changes in ME. Also people heavily underappreciated the difficulty of the field. From a SWE perspective, Robotics Engineers need to know physics and math than the average SWE learns. Interestingly almost all the successful robot projects I've worked on seem to follow…

> waterfall process ... keep working on it till it works I thought waterfall was to plan it out in detail, then do all the work according to the plan despite realizing that the plan is wrong, then finally, after disbanding the development team, test it to see if it works? That's obviously a caricature, but if you have the feedback loop to see if it works while you're working on it, you might also call it agile.

You’ve described waterfall accurately, but waterfall is kind of an anti-pattern. Nobody actually uses it.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#178

Post by tomcam »

Animats wrote: post #7

It's very MIT. It's also an illustration of what went wrong with the "internet of things" concept. Sensors are easy today. Actuators are hard. Most "IoT" things can't do much. Try to buy a home power window. They exist. They're an exotic luxury home item. Even controllable home HVAC dampers are rare. It makes good sense to have a system where windows, fans, dampers, heaters, and compressors are all coordinated to max…

I have highly efficient actuators directly attached to my shoulders that open and close windows with remarkable ease.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#179

Post by PascLeRasc »

dhosek wrote: post #162
ascar wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be a start, but higher education only scratches the surface of on-the-job skills in engineering. You learn the basic tools, the way of thinking and the skill of acquiring additional knowledge. You get near to zero experience on real engineering problems as encountered in business. So in the good case this degree might broaden your horizon and teaches you that you don't know enough and in the bad case it mi…

The capstone of the engineering major is the engineering clinic project which has students working on “real engineering problems as encountered in business”. Companies pay the college to have teams of senior engineering majors solve a problem they face. Two of the sexier projects were Disneyland hired HMC to come up with an anti-collision system for autopia and West Dorm had a clinic team refurbish a beloved vintage…

My university had a student club doing that and it's probably my fondest memory of engineering. It was so inspiring and almost addicting to work on projects that actual people would use or have their lives improved by. And you got to have a hand in writing firmware, machining parts/enclosures, meeting the customer (mostly doctors, which was super cool), and researching the market fit for if it were a real project. It was so much fun.

I really wish my post-college engineering experience could be anything like that. I miss making useful things.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#180

Post by lmilcin »

jki275 wrote: post #177
ptx wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> waterfall process ... keep working on it till it works I thought waterfall was to plan it out in detail, then do all the work according to the plan despite realizing that the plan is wrong, then finally, after disbanding the development team, test it to see if it works? That's obviously a caricature, but if you have the feedback loop to see if it works while you're working on it, you might also call it agile.

You’ve described waterfall accurately, but waterfall is kind of an anti-pattern. Nobody actually uses it.

You mean there are no places where managers tell their teams the scope and deadlines and then tell the team to go play "agile"?
Post reply on HN