Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | WillAdams's commentslogin

Ousterhout's _A Philosophy of Software Design_ (mentioned elsethread) would be mine.

Visual list of well-known aphorisms and so forth.

A couple are well-described/covered in books, e.g., Tesler's Law (Conservation of Complexity) is at the core of _A Philosophy of Software Design_ by John Ousterhout

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy...

(and of course Brook's Law is from _The Mythical Man Month_)

Curious if folks have recommendations for books which are not as well-known which cover these, other than the _Laws of Software Engineering_ book which the site is an advertisement for.....


Fujitsu used to offer them --- their Stylistic ST-4110 was my favourite device for a very long while, used as for maps/navigation as well as an ebook reader in addition to being my main computer --- quite miss it and the simplicity of a single (stylus-equipped/daylight-viewable) device, as opposed to the ménagerie which I currently use (Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, Book 3 Pro 360, Kindle Scribe Coloursoft, Wacom One attached to MacBook)

Yeah, my sister bought into the Kindle eco-system early on, but I picked a Sony PRS-505 instead (mostly because it would fit in a Travelsmith shirt pocket) and for a long while, the only ebook which I had "purchased" was Robert Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ which I got w/ a $10 credit for browsing their store on a certain day (which I then got a price-fixing rebate check for which I kind of wish I'd kept...) and it was so rife with errors I had to check out a copy from the library to determine what some of them were. When the Sony ebook store closed down, my "library" was transferred to Kobo's and their copy of that novel was made in a different fashion, or corrected, so was actually readable on the Sony PRS-600 I eventually upgraded to.

Since then, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, and I've made a game of either getting free e-books when offered on the store, or purchasing books when on sale and I've had sufficient Amazon gift cards from Microsoft Rewards, so that I've not spent "real" money on any virtual books, except for when I've purchased an ebook to go along with a newly published hardcover by an author whose work I feel strongly enough that it merits such doubled purchasing.


I still regret not buying the nifty 3D printed (out of kevlar and other materials) chisel roll Lee Valley offered a while back....

Components are pretty easily done via pick-and-place, which was just demonstrated on video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGZ0qpPN1uk

once one can make traces in 3D as part of a case/shell/frame/structure things get _very_ interesting --- consider that one electronics designer actually worked up a 3D CAD system:

https://dune3d.org/

just for making 3D printed enclosures:

>My primary use case for 3D CAD is designing 3D-printed enclosures for my electronics projects.

So, imagine what folks like that will make when they are able to 3D print a full circuit board as part of a structure, with components place/oriented in it in novel ways (heat dissipation? LEDs to indicate status?)....


Status LED and button placement, those would be the the major benefits over conventional boards in non-exotic fields like putting circuits on plants. Would be fantastically valuable for the one-off tinkerer. But yeah, substituting home etching or milling and reflow would also be quite a dream come true.

Though, I generally like the idea of circuit traces embedded directly in mechanical design of a product, I suppose this would make devices completely and utterly non-repairable. Not that there's something new in this, but imagine, debugging a 3d volumetric circuit, where chips and discrete components baked solid into medium? And I also wonder, where such super high level of integration would be necessary, other than medical/wearable/implantable devices...

The smaller you can make things or more integral the more interesting you can do things - vape carts are a good example where it might actually reduce the total ewaste if the chip and the body were integral (though clearly would still create it)

Design the "board" as a central component w/ one or more snap-on ocovers?

An important consideration is that just the graph of who talks to whom can be quite powerful:

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...


A hand-written essay in class would seem to be a workable mechanism for a student to demonstrate an ability to reason on their own about a subject.

One of my best college professors would review such essays in-person, one-on-one twice each semester.


FWIW, I'm quite disappointed that they didn't continue in the vein of the Windows 8 app which was touch friendly and worked quite nicely w/ a stylus.

I'm hoping that with the discontinuation of:

https://read.amazon.com/kindle-notebook

that it will become possible to view Kindle Scribe notebooks in this new application as it is to view them in the Kindle App on Android (when it doesn't crash).


Back when I was actively trying to keep track of CAD/CAM software being developed which was applicable to a hobbyist CNC project, just the Python projects, esp. those which extended/enabled/replaced OpenSCAD was a full-time endeavour.

Now that there is:

https://pythonscad.org/

my hope is that this effort will begin to coalesce and focus on that tool/environment, and that further effort will be made to improve it.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: