Hacker News: auxym

New comment by auxym in "PCB devboard the size of a USB-C plug"

auxym — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:46:42 +0000

They had stopped for a while because they were transitioning away from using Paypal as a processor. A few weeks, maybe a month or so tops? I had to switch to JLC PCB for an order back in January, because they didn't support any viable payment method for me in Canada (tried to make a payoneer account, they don't do business in Canada).

But I just checked and it seems that they now accept CCs again.

New comment by auxym in "Poor Deming never stood a chance"

auxym — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:18:58 +0000

In case anyone is interested, I enjoyed the book "Turn the Ship Around!" by L. David Marquet, about management lessons applied by the author who was a US Navy submarine captain. It does very much emphasize giving trust, responsibility and accountability to workers (or enlisted personnel, in this case).

New comment by auxym in "Prism"

auxym — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:25:21 +0000

Agreed. Tex/Latex is very old tech. Error recovery and messages is very bad. Developing new macros in Tex is about as fun as you expect developing in a 70s-era language to be (ie probably similar to cobol and old fortran).

I haven't tried it yet but Typst seems like a promising replacement: https://typst.app/

New comment by auxym in "The C-Shaped Hole in Package Management"

auxym — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:07:55 +0000

uv has mostly solved the python issue. IME it's dependency resolution is fast and just works. Packages are hard linked from a global cache, which also greatly reduces storage requirements when you work with multiple projects.

New comment by auxym in ""Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?""

auxym — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:09:47 +0000

I mean, he absolutely knew it was going to burn up. But I have no trouble believing that such a circuit was designed by AI.

New comment by auxym in "The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up"

auxym — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:16:15 +0000

It's because aluminium has a higher coefficient of thermal expansion. It expands and shrinks more as it heats, and as those cycles add up it tends to loosen electrical connections. Loose connections have higher resistance, heat up and can cause fires.

That said, there is no reason we can't design better connectors that can withstand the expansion and shrinkage cycles, like spring loaded or spring cage connectors.

New comment by auxym in "Developing a high level language over Zig"

auxym — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:25:00 +0000

Just an idea but Nim seems to have the features you mentioned. Nim "transpiles" to C, and can even be compiled via `zig cc` (which is an interace to clang). If you really want to, maybe you could make a zig backend for Nim?

New comment by auxym in "Show HN: Free and local browser tool for designing gear models for 3D printing"

auxym — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:51:42 +0000

As long as you keep the module and pressure angle the same, the gears should be compatible.

New comment by auxym in "Show HN: Free and local browser tool for designing gear models for 3D printing"

auxym — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:50:37 +0000

This is great! Any chance you could add STEP export also? It would facilitate importing into CAD software to customize the gear, eg to add a custom hub.

New comment by auxym in "A Guide to Magnetizing N48 Magnets in Ansys Maxwell"

auxym — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:36:21 +0000

Typically, company would pay for a week or so of training if you don't have previous experience with the software.

Once again, this isn't a huge expense compared to the license cost + the engineer's salary.

Then for ongoing support/questions you get the support I mentioned including the onsite support engineer.

New comment by auxym in "Go away Python"

auxym — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 13:30:08 +0000

uv uses a global cache but hardlinks the dependencies for your script into a temp venv that is only for your script, so its still pretty fast.

The Death of the Draftsman

auxym — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:44:26 +0000

Article URL: https://tecnetinc.com/The%20Death%20of%20the%20Draftsman.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398001

Points: 14

# Comments: 1

New comment by auxym in "A Guide to Magnetizing N48 Magnets in Ansys Maxwell"

auxym — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 13:00:15 +0000

Ansys also costs 5 digits per seat per year.

My experience working at large size company that paid those sort of sums for a different FEA software is that we got an "application engineer" assigned to us to answer any questions we had and provide needed documentation if anything was needed. He actually sat and worked from our own offices one day per week.

New comment by auxym in "Put a ring on it: a lock-free MPMC ring buffer"

auxym — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:33:08 +0000

Also this Nim library: https://github.com/nim-works/loony

Which is based on: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9490347

New comment by auxym in "Why we built Lightpanda in Zig"

auxym — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 16:24:25 +0000

Also wasn't the D compiler proprietary and a paid product for a long time after its initial release?

No judgement against trying to monetize valuable work, but in this day and nearly everyone expects free and OSS compilers/interpreters and core tooling.

New comment by auxym in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

auxym — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 01:53:44 +0000

> it is like C in that you can fit the whole language in your head.

Sure, you can fit all of C in your head, including all the obscure footguns that can lead to UB: https://gist.github.com/Earnestly/7c903f481ff9d29a3dd1

And other fun things like aliasing rules and type punning.

New comment by auxym in "Ask HN: What open source projects are you grateful for?"

auxym — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 22:05:42 +0000

Scoop (https://scoop.sh/), a package manager for windows that is essential to make Windows usable for me.

Sourcegit is my new favorite git client. Git in general, of course.

Linux and also the people behind RT_PREEMPT, I am excited to see it merged into mainline this year.

KDE has been my favorite DE for years and I use many of their apps too, such as Kate. Thanks to everyone contributing to the KDE project.

The entire python "data science" stack, numpy/scipy/matplotlib/pandas/plotly/polars/pyarrow/jupyter, which is essential to my work. Tiny projects too, like nptdms.

The raspberry pi foundation, in particular for the pico, rp2040 and rp2350. Joy to work with, great documentation, super cheap and available, perfect for one-off projects, prototypes and hobby stuff, which is pretty much always neglected by the big silicon vendors.

I set up my own NAS this year, running many self-hosted apps. I am grateful for Truenas, Jellyfin and pihole.

So many cli apps that I use daily:

- starship prompt - fd - ripgrep - fzf - lazygit - yazi

Firefox gets sometimes deserved criticism, but I have been using it continuously since Firebird 0.7 and I believe it contributes to keeping the web open.

New comment by auxym in "What's Hiding Inside Haribo's Power Bank and Headphones?"

auxym — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:40:32 +0000

Unless things have changed, Amazon is the official and only reseller for Anker products in Canada and probably many other countries.

New comment by auxym in "Advent of Code 2025"

auxym — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 17:28:33 +0000

I've had a lot of fun using Nim for AOC for many years. Once you're familiar with the language and std lib, its almost as fast to write as python, but much faster (Nim compiles to C, which then gets compiled to your executable). This means that sometimes, if your solution isn't perfect in terms of algorithmic complexity, waiting a few minutes can still save you (waiting 5 mins for your slow Nim code is OK, waiting 5 hours for your slow Python isn't really, for me). Of course all problems have a solution that can run in seconds even in Python, but sometimes it's not the one I figure out first try.

Downsides: The debugging situation is pretty bad (hope you like printf debugging), smaller community means smaller package ecosystem and fewer reference solutions to look up if you're stuck or looking for interesting alternative ideas after solving a problem on your own, but there's still quality stuff out there.

Though personally I'm thinking of trying Go this year, just for fun and learning something new.

Edit: also a static type system can save you from a few stupid bugs that you then spend 15 minutes tracking down because you added a "15" to your list without converting it to an int first or something like that.

New comment by auxym in "The R47: A new physical RPN calculator"

auxym — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 18:43:28 +0000

Just as a fun fact, some of the largest tractors made these days actually rival F1 cars in horsepower output. John Deere 9RX goes up to 913 HP for example.