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rubylark's comments

rubylark | 1 year ago | on: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

I'm a third generation "woman in tech" (grandma did punch cards, mom did COBOL) and I haven't had any problems that I keep being told I'm supposed to have. I suspect discrimination is location specific. The most I get is the annoying "you guys..." pause to think "...and gal".

(PSA: "you guys" is gender neutral)

rubylark | 2 years ago | on: Ending an Ugly Chapter in Chip Design

The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that Chatterjee's motives and subsequent termination (which is not elaborated on) was related to gender discrimination. Otherwise I can't see what relevance anyone's genders has on the issue at hand.

rubylark | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?

I'll add an anecdote to contradict that argument:

I work in embedded, and the place I work restructured to have a dedicated software group. They hired young software engineers and focused on getting people who are good programmers without really caring what they were good at. Most people ended up being web developers and liked webstack.

We were tasked with making a handheld air quality measurement device with a touch screen that could pair with a computer app that we would also write. Most people on the team knew webstack so we decided on a HTML/CSS/JavaScript +SQLite that would run in Electron Chromium on Linux on the physical device.

So what went wrong? Well, electron is bloated for embedded devices and the mid-tier processor we were using chugged so much that it would get hot. Hot enough to affect the temperature sensors at the top of the board and throw off the gas density measurements. Our MVP was nearly done when we discovered this problem.

We had two choices: throw out the hardware or throw out the software. We ended up throwing out the software and starting over (in Winforms + C# if anyone's curious). I and two others quit as a result. It is _really_ depressing redoing something you've already done in a different language.

If we picked the lighter weight framework from the start instead of picking the language most people knew, we wouldn't have lost a year of work.

rubylark | 3 years ago | on: The Style Guide for America’s Highways

Do you have examples of wordy US signs that are only symbolic in the EU system? All of the ones I see on the article are either city names or pedestrian signs with complex instructions that I don't think could be conveyed effectively in only symbolic form.

The ones I can think of that are words only that might have a better symbolic notation are Dead End, No Outlet, and No Passing Zone.

rubylark | 3 years ago | on: Sesame allergen labeling law has unintended effect: sesame in more foods

Why not? If the airline has a policy that allows them to fly, why wouldn't they? It's not the people with allergies asking the flight not to serve other people peanuts, it's the airline itself deciding to do that.

Besides if someone has a contact allergy to nuts, I can't think of a place more likely for it to happen than a plane. One patch of turbulence, and your seat neighbor's peanuts go all over you.

rubylark | 3 years ago | on: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

I find this kind of assumption that "coders can't understand feelings" as a harmful stereotype and baseless assumption just because many of the comments here disagree with your take. Emotional intelligence* has nothing to do with it; sympathy does. You can recognize the emotions of others without feeling sympathy for them. You think the author is sympathetic, others here (myself included)...don't.

*Emotional intelligence is the recognition of your emotions, the emotions of others, how your actions influence the emotions of others, and how to regulate your own emotions. Ironically, by this definition, the author is the one lacking emotional intelligence. They didn't understand why they were angry, why others were frustrated or how to mitigate it. They still don't understand that just saying that you are at peace doesn't mean that you are. To me, the author is still brimming with hurt, anger, jealousy, greed, and pride, and because of these last three, I don't have much sympathy.

rubylark | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How I get a job that uses C?

Not that uncommon in my experience. Depends on the kind of microcontrollers/embedded computers. Weaker ones are closer to the bare metal and need some EE during development. More complex ones with a GUI or that run Linux are mostly application level work. And for mid-level microcontrollers (the kind I work on), once the drivers are there, it's all application work.

The problem for switching from pure software to embedded is that companies like you to have EE experience, even if the job doesn't require it at the moment, so you can use it if you need it. Of all my embedded coworkers, only one was a pure CompSci major. The rest were CompE or EE.

Personally I consider myself more SWE than EE, and half of my job titles have been "Software Engineer" instead of "Firmware Engineer" or "Embedded Engineer".

rubylark | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How I get a job that uses C?

Depends on the project. Most of the teams I've been on were 4-12 SWE for 1-3 EEs. These were usually mid-range microcontrollers with GUIs. It's typically only weaker, single-purpose embedded without an RTOS (like sensors or whatnot) that has 1 to 1 unless the company wants the project to drag on for half a decade.

rubylark | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How I get a job that uses C?

I exclusively work on microcontroller projects, and my experience is the same. I've only worked on one project that really needed my EE experience to write some drivers. Once the drivers are there, it's all application layer for the rest of the project, which usually go on for 1-3 years for a team of 1 to 12 people.

rubylark | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How I get a job that uses C?

Depends on the embedded system. I've only worked in mid-sized companies, and most of my projects were teams of 4 to 12 SWE-type with 1 to 3 EE for the project. Typically light ARM4 or weaker microcontrollers will have smaller teams, or no team, while anything beefier, like embedded Linux projects or anything with a UI, will have bigger ones.

rubylark | 3 years ago | on: The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

Absolutely. This modchip is just a raspberry pi plus a couple parts. You'd have to try hard to get it to be expensive. The BOM for most embedded systems is going to be cheap unless you need some exotic hardware. It really does seem to ignore the amount of time this guy spent to get to figure out what parts he needed and where to solder them. If it was developed by a company instead of an individual, you can bet it wouldn't have cost "only $25 to develop".

Edit: fixed for clarity of thought

rubylark | 3 years ago | on: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

I really like this strategy. After one god awful experience at a company that led me to quitting after 3 months, I will not work for a company that doesn't show me a snippet of their own code. The whole experience at that terrible job could have been avoided if I could see their coding practices: early returns, gotos everywhere in C++, 7(!) different languages that compile into one >1GB executable over the course of an hour. They only did white boarding questions which told them a lot about me, but told me nothing about them.

I've had 4ish interviews since that job, and all of them gave an on-the-spot code reading assignment to walk through their code to find the bugs. It let me see who has old style coding standards, who takes advantage of modern C++ utilities, and that the interviewers are competent enough to walk through coding examples, too.

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