I'm sure your feedback is appreciated, but the tone of your reply is a skeptical engineer with arms crosses. This is a show HN post, and we should support the founder(s) if we think this is a good idea. Clearly a MVP product is not going to check all your boxes, but does it have the potential to be really useful?
I see this idea as a sort of AI ERC/DRC checker that offers some incredible opportunities. Even if it only catches one small, it could save thousand of dollars down the line.
It's another tool in the toolbox for hardware designers.
>> Even if it only catches one small, it could save thousand of dollars down the line.
Or it could send a design team down thousands of dollars in false positives/false negatives. With zero benchmarks provided, it is very fair to question a product that could have material negative impacts on a hardware team.
The tool would ideally classify the output into levels. Just like a compiler or DRC checker. If you submit a clean design, the tool should not be throwing major flags. 99% of the time you should be getting advisory outputs, which should not be tricking any designer. The 1% red flags should easily be understood and if you, as the designer, can't discern them, perhaps you don't understand the fundamentals of your own design.
Back in the day our hardware group created a pre-flight checklist before sending boards off to fab. This reduced our errors significantly and got rid of stupid mistakes. Your product idea sounds great and has ton of opportunity for additional features like supply chain analysis, alternate part sourcing, EMC advisory, etc.
Thank you so much! Totally agree. Knowing people in the space to sanity-check designs has saved me countless times. I’m hoping this tool can bring some of that ‘pre-flight checklist’ group wisdom to solo and newer designers as well. Really appreciate the feature ideas too!
Isn’t the primary issue that newer designers don’t know they show run ERC (or that ERC even exists)? Isn’t your tool going to have the same issue? i.e. how do user even know they should run it in the first place? How do you plan to overcome that barrier?
I’m not against more automated checkers, I’m very much for automated checkers, but I’m curious how you plan to not repeat the mistakes of the past.
The conventional wisdom here on HN is that every single item sold on Amazon is fake, without exception.
Realistically, there are probably some legit 18650s and lots of fake ones. But it could be difficult to figure out which ones are legit before buying them. Co-mingling of warehouse stock is often cited as a reason why this is impossible: a legitimate seller may list their items, and then some sellers of fakes come along and state that they are selling the same SKU, and Amazon will mix all of these in a single bin in the warehouses, and you don't know which one you're getting in your order.
Yeh, it's kind of insane that most electronics sold on Amazon now are counterfeit, fake or dangerous. How do they have no legal responsibility for the products sold in their store.
Probably not many real cells on Amazon, I looked quickly and the first 2 pages didn't have a single legitimate cell, but there are several online stores that sell legitimate cells like 18650batterystore.com
I think SpaceX is taking the re-usability part of Starship as foundation. Meaning they won't move forward until it's solved. With Falcon they added it as a bit of a secondary priority. They've spent so much resources trying to get the second stage back to earth. I think they should have just focused on getting the whole system flying to orbit, throwing away second stage for now, and using that platform to replace falcon. Eventually, they could refactor second stage to get it back to earth. But perhaps it's all too coupled that it has to be solved at one time (not later).
So it might come down to how many "9s" you're comfortable with. The experience is really good 99.999% of the time until it's not, and that "not" could be catastrophic. I suppose the data engineers are quite confident in the 9s.
Lyft is 99.99999% with 1.02 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled[0].
Waymo is 100% with zero fatalities.
But then again, the Concorde was the safest airplane ever built for nearly 30 years, until its first crash and then it was the most dangerous passenger jet ever with 12.5 fatal events per million flights.[1]
It feels like it would be useful to also know how many fatalities would be expected from Lyft in the number of miles Waymo has traveled based on their calculated rate (which should be fairly straightforward to calculate with only the rate you gave and the number of miles Waymo has traveled, although I'm not sure if it's known) and the probability that Lyft would also see zero fatalities with that number of miles traveled (which I think would require more detailed knowledge like variance, although I admit I haven't spent enough time to convince myself with complete confidence that this is correct).
I imagine it also goes without saying that not every mile of road is equally risky, and I have to imagine that Waymo's miles traveled probably on far less risky roads on average given the way they've been rolled out (which isn't a bad thing, but it does make extrapolations from the data about relative safety a bit more dubious).
Unfortunately stats can be spun in whatever way you need them to in order to support or hinder an effort.
To use your example, risk per mile is a sliding scale, not necessarily a Boolean value. So then someone could conceivably draw the line on that scale wherever most benefited the company they were trying to support.
It's not about absolute reliability, it's about how well it compares to the alternative, which is human taxi drivers. And the thing is, you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
> you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
Another very interesting thing about robotaxis is agency and blame. Taxi driver had an accident? Just that driver is suspect. Robotaxi had an accident? They're all suspect.
I was on the fence for same reason - should I get the nano display? I opted for the 15" MBA, and the display has been great. Way better than my 2019 Macbook Pro. I've had zero issues with glare, but I'm also in an office environment during the day and use it at night when home.
reply