This week I've been "rejuvenating" my 11 year old i7 2600k desktop. I built a zen 3 based computer a couple years ago, purely as a luxury, after spending 5 days in the hospital ICU. The i7 was chugging along just fine doing whatever I needed it to do, and it seemed a waste to just forget about it.
I fully disassembled it and cleaned out the dust. I spent an evening lapping the CPU and heat sink down to 2000 grit. I put it in a new case, as the old one's front panel fell off. I installed my old GTX 970 GPU, which seems like a perfect pairing.
Maybe I'll gift it to a young nephew, or maybe I'll set it to easily boot up into a mentally stimulating game for my 4 year old daughter. Her knowledge of computer games right now is beamng.drive and tux racer!
Yeah, I was "flight software" on a control shift for a Dragon space capsule when I was 26, and the "mission director" was probably a year or two younger than me. Other shifts had older directors though.
Flight software is a fun role because they're the first person anyone asks when something goes wrong. "What's causing that sensor to glitch out, is it a bug?" "Uh no, probably not. Hey I'm just a software engineer, but is it possible the pyrowhatzit is actually melting right now?" "Oh crap"
When I worked at SpaceX, a dozen or so of us once played it between the primary and backup mission control rooms. It was nice having the expensive headsets. All I remember is someone on the other team "hacking" our spaceship by using the company IT system to remotely reboot our team's computer terminals.
"Forward error correction" is really just the application of ECC while transmitting data over a lossy link in order to tolerate errors without two-way communication.
The ECC used in memory is likely relatively space inefficient at the benefit of being computationally simple so it can be done quickly in hardware. More redundancy could be added to tolerate more bit flips, but it would either add a lot of memory overhead, or a lot of computational complexity. In particular, something really good like reed solomon would likely be very difficult to encode on every single memory write, at least not without taking a several order of magnitude performance hit. It would likely be easier just to have 2x ECC memory, or 3x non-ECC memory and do majority voting.
A single particle strike would only affect a single transistor. If that transistor controls a whole column of memory, then sure it could corrupt lots of bits. With ECC, though, it would probably result in a bunch of ECC blocks with a single bit flip, rather than a single ECC block with several bit flips.
I've had good success both ways. If you have less leverage, I'd say avoid naming a price first. If you clearly have the upper hand, then it doesn't really matter.
To get the best deal possible, you have to be willing to walk away. Higher risk, higher reward. It's also really important to be polite, friendly and honest (a little bit of bluffing is ok though) the whole process. You really do need to do the research beforehand to know what's reasonable to ask for. The other side did.
I like to imagine there's an alien species zipping around in FTL space ships, and the only difference from us is they picked one endianness and ran with it.
The robotics prototyping internship roles require solving our Zip Sim coding challenge. I designed it with the intention above all of being fun, so check it out even if you're not seriously looking for a job.
If there isn't a posting that fits what you're looking for, just apply for the internship and abuse the Zip Sim text entry field to describe exactly what you're looking for, and we'll go from there.
I've had good success with shebangs combined with zip archives containing python code. Zip files use a footer rather than a header, and python natively supports executing scripts out of them. The beginning of the file can have a shebang, allowing it to specify the interpreter to use. The only trick is that windows doesn't support shebangs, and so you need to associate your chosen file extension with python on every system. Also, you need python installed obviously.
What that gives you is a stable entry point into python code. From there, you can run whatever platform specific code you want.
I got my bachelors and masters from University of Michigan. It was really just an excuse to stick around for a couple more semesters and do another solar car race. After a few years of experience, the masters doesn't really matter beyond what you personally gained out of the education.
There are tons of embedded software projects that lack software engineering rigor. If you're good at unit testing and mocking, for example, there's no reason why you can't unit test embedded code. Applying general software engineering practices to embedded code (effectively) is a good way to differentiate yourself.
The best way to get into the system is by submitting your resume on the careers page. I'll give a heads-up to the recruiting team to look out for any submissions mentioning hacker news.
I'm jealous, I haven't actually made it out myself yet! I've got a little baby to come home to. It's been a very supportive company in terms of work/life balance as well.
Mainly geographic positioning due to lack of road infrastructure and reliable utilities. Roads are massive capital investments regardless of tech ability, and lots of populated places in the world are still hard to get to quickly. Many medical products are generally available but have a very short shelf life, and so our delivery service helps make them reachable to significantly more people.
There's a handful of places in the USA with thriving tech industry, and there's plenty of opportunity in general, but quite often people have to relocate for the really exciting opportunities. I haven't been to Spain, but my understanding of European culture is that folk generally stick around where they grew up. There's plenty of cool embedded stuff going on in Europe if you look for it. For example, I am aware of a lot of really neat drive-by-wire actuator development.
I'm helping to build a scalable system for delivering high value and life saving medical supplies to hard to reach places via autonomous aircraft. The system is currently operating in Rwanda and Ghana, and aggressively expanding over the next couple years.
Specifically, I spend a lot of time thinking about and writing embedded software. The aircraft is fully autonomous and needs to be able to fly home safely even after suffering major component failures. I split my time between improving core architectural components, implementing new features, designing abstractions, and adding testing and tooling to make our ever-growing team work more efficiently.
I did FIRST robotics in high school where I mainly focused on controller firmware. I studied computer science in college while building the embedded electronics for solar powered race cars, and also worked part time on research projects at Toyota. After graduating with a Master's degree, I stumbled into a job at SpaceX where I worked a lot on the software for cargo Dragon, then built out a platform for microcontroller firmware development. I decided to leave SpaceX while happy, and spent a couple years working on the self driving car prototype (the one that looked like a koala) at Google. Coming up on my third year, I was itching for something less comfortable and decided to join a scrappy small startup with a heart of gold. Now it's in the hundreds of employees and getting crazier and crazier.
I fully disassembled it and cleaned out the dust. I spent an evening lapping the CPU and heat sink down to 2000 grit. I put it in a new case, as the old one's front panel fell off. I installed my old GTX 970 GPU, which seems like a perfect pairing.
Maybe I'll gift it to a young nephew, or maybe I'll set it to easily boot up into a mentally stimulating game for my 4 year old daughter. Her knowledge of computer games right now is beamng.drive and tux racer!