Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46552534

Points: 67

# Comments: 19

I guess it will work for some sites, but it would be interesting to know what fraction.

"Test your adblocker" websites can harm users and the adblocker ecosystem (brave.com)

In British English a "scheme" has no negative connotations. It's commonly used in all kinds of legitimate places - for example the company you work at will have a "pension scheme".

In U.S. English it has a connotation that it is nefarious in some way.

1) They are my repos. I should get to decide the appropriate level of security.

2) 2FA is often used as a pretext for identity harvesting which are then abused for other purposes.

3) If there is account recovery via email then the whole thing is a charade anyway.

Note the disclaimer: "This course has not yet been updated to work with the Raspberry Pi models B+ and A+. Some elements may not work, in particular the first few lessons about the LED. It has also not been updated for Raspberry Pi v2."

And presumably not updated for the Pi 3,4,5 too!

All appliances in the UK have a fuse where they connect to the building wiring, normally in the plug, but can be in a fixed fuse-holder like this device. Somewhere in the process it was recognized that having lots of different fuse values would be confusing and awkward for users, so these fuses are the same size and always one of three standard values: 13A, 5A, and 3A. As noted elsewhere, you can buy these particular fuses in UK supermarkets and convenience stores.

If 3A is too high for the appliance then what the designer has to do is to fit it with a flex rated at 3A so that is protected by the fuse at the plug-end and then add additional, lower current, protection at the device end.

The UK system is clever and has subtle details like the standard fuse values which were good at the time it was introduced. But, it is also rather over-engineered, and not optimized for modern homes that have a lot of low-current appliances.

Because BBC Basic had a built-in assembler it was pretty uncommon for BBC programs to inline machine code as raw data (unlike some other computers from BITD).

It's been around more than 15 years in various forms now, but people still love playing it. If you're in London it is at https://www.novelty-automation.com/

The captcha with the hononyms and the selection boxes where you don't expect them is genius.

I found Paul's sim by chance and really liked it because it was the first electronics sim that I had seen that was properly interactive and visual in its approach. I thought it was a great tool for building intuition about circuits. However, at a certain point it became clear that Java in the browser was on its way out, and this really needed to become a plug-in free experience if it was going to continue to be useful.

This was about the time that V8 was coming along and revoluationizing the performance of JS. Originally there was no license attached to the project, so I asked Paul if he was OK in me trying to port it to run on JS using the GWT framework. He was fine, but said he'd done old experiments with some of his other sims and found that JS wasn't performant enough, but with the strides in JS performance I was more optimistic.

I took the Jave code and commented just about everything out to get a minimal implementation of the standard LRC circuit just to see the performance. Once I was comfortable with that working I started adding every feature and every component back. Most of the work was replacing the Java graphics primitives with the equivalents from GWT.

Once the initial version JS version was out I did quite a lot of work mostly on UI features, especially the 'scopes. They were rather weak in the original and still not as good as I would really like, but much improved.

I have thought about monetizing and extending with EDA features, socials, etc. but its never been enough of a priority to do it. I kind of like its simplicity as it is.

It has been used a lot in education and a couple of teachers have contributed to the code to support their uses in classrooms.

It's kind-of amazing that it still has a very distinctive niche that nobody else has really gone after in quite the same way. I think a lot of that is because Paul's original vision and work on the Java version was so good.

There is a bit more context and some tutorials here: http://lushprojects.com/circuitjs/

The photoresistor is just controlled by the slider in the side-bar. It doesn't respond to lights in the circuit. There is an "optocoupler" under "active building blocks" that does connect optically.

I've seen a few requests to add feedback that occurs outside the electrical domain - light is one, but also for mechanical movement (motors that turn generators). But, I pesonally think it's hard to know how to model all these non-electrical interactions in a way that is visually clear and effective.

I haven't contributed for a couple of years, but Paul still actively maintains it.

Do you have specific ideas on what would be changed to "revitalize" it? I agree the UI is kind of basic (it could do with a pallet of common components), but I still like the productivity of it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33732564

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31476583

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

My explore page used to be hit-and-miss, but generally somewhat relevent. Over the last few days it has been filled with revolting photos of fake-tanned idiots. No amount of attempting to swat then with "Not Interested" seems to work.