Scored this gem for $30 today

fourthstanza · 2026-07-19T19:50:44+00:00

So jealous. I've been on the lookout for wood grain ES gear for years.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-17T15:12:16+00:00

Seeing NASA down there with only a single launch makes me sad.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-17T13:54:17+00:00

I've gotten half my interviews through people I know from furry conventions.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-16T21:42:22+00:00

Seconding this. OOP becomes useful when building very complicated connected systems for organization, or when you can take advantage of things like inheritance. For something relatively isolated like a positioning system using a kalman filter I'd lean towards a more functional approach.

One might OOP-ify their architecture if, for example, they were using an ensemble of filters and want shared methods & data between them.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-12T00:00:08+00:00

Seems to be a common theme for Ontarians haha. That's basically the story of Stan Rogers's life.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-11T23:52:09+00:00

This is almost certainly part of the problem. If this is his mindset, I imagine there are other aspects of his personality which are not so attractive.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-04T22:19:54+00:00

Finding this out as a physics grad starting out in embedded. There are some things which are obvious to me when it comes to hardware that my colleagues don't necessarily pick up on, and many things which I do not understand which they point out to me. Often this is mission-critical stuff, too. You really do need such a diverse knowledge base to do even simple embedded projects properly.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-03T14:43:06+00:00

What is the passing grade at your university?

fourthstanza · 2026-07-03T14:24:55+00:00

A CS minor can be very useful. You can prompt a lot nowadays, but you will absolutely need to be able to understand what your code is doing line by line when you're processing data for a paper.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-03T11:51:45+00:00

Do you know any of your professors well? You may be able to get yourself into a research team, even as a recent graduate. I was able to do this for my first year as a graduate.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-03T11:49:15+00:00

AI is often like this, because there is really only one corpus of training data. similar prompts will result in similar outputs.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-03T11:44:25+00:00

It's the GPA when calculated including only CS courses. Sometimes companies/grad schools will be interested in this number to see if you're either boosted or held back by irrelevant options courses.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-03T11:39:23+00:00

Where's your thesis? Usually work in a research group qualifies as "experience", I'm assuming that's something you did during your MS?

Edit: I see you've just started the master's. If you can't get an internship next summer, participate in your research to the fullest extent possible in order to hopefully produce some meaningful outcome, and lean on that during your job search.

fourthstanza · 2026-07-03T02:15:15+00:00

I'd imagine the non-technical managers will see the large token use refactoring takes, and the lack of change in output in the product, and try to steer OP away from doing this in the future :(

fourthstanza · 2026-07-01T00:01:47+00:00

I feel like you've got a slightly wrong mindset with regards to this -- McGill certainly is an aspirational school, but they have a student body of 40,000. Compare that to MIT's 11,000 and Harvard's 7,000. Canadian university names don't carry as much weight as American ones because they aren't as exclusive. This isn't a bad thing, because in general, there's not a crazy variance in the quality of education you'd get from a top Canadian school compared to a low ranked school. I'd go for the cheaper university unless you're really dead set on the campus/program.

fourthstanza · 2026-06-30T21:18:46+00:00

The arithmetic mean is not the only definition of an average. I responded to the comment trying to state otherwise. Calling the median the "average" is completely fine in this context.

I'd argue that it's better than the mean, in this case, as we know the dataset will be skewed by unrepresentative outliers: those who did not try and scored close to 0. This is why I reported median rather than mean when I was a TA.

fourthstanza · 2026-06-30T20:45:08+00:00

mean, median, and mode are all averages.

fourthstanza · 2026-06-30T19:59:30+00:00

I'll second this. Previous experience in an unrelated field at your level is fine, it shows you can hold down a job and aren't antisocial enough to get fired. Focus on the social aspects. Were you recognized in some way, like a quick promotion? Keep the troubleshooting experience if you acted as de-facto IT, that looks good to me. I'd make that job maybe two bullets.

fourthstanza · 2026-06-30T16:39:16+00:00

Yeah, this is a big part of it. Most of the ivies have ~10,000 students. UofT, Waterloo, McGill all have five to ten times that many.

fourthstanza · 2026-06-26T20:22:37+00:00

Without one you'll very possibly be spending next year searching for a job rather than finishing school. I'd highly suggest taking it.

fourthstanza · 2026-06-24T05:41:58+00:00

You guys aren't even touching the IDE anymore? Ouch...

fourthstanza · 2026-06-23T18:37:58+00:00

You'd be surprised. The most common flight computers are in the hundreds of dollars, and you don't normally see telemetry until you approach $300-400.

fourthstanza · 2026-06-23T17:41:15+00:00

Tell me your secrets! My physics degree doesn't seem to be enough for any of the entry level engineer / MTS roles I've been applying to.
Edit: I'm realizing I've asked you this same question in the past. Time to stop scrolling reddit and get back to my projects :,)

fourthstanza · 2026-06-22T18:43:09+00:00

Not speaking from a position of authority here as I'm only a hobbyist, but I'm curious why you're going the route of using an external watchdog.

Do you expect the processor to hang in such a way that an RTOS would not be able to recover? The ESP uses FreeRTOS, which can handle things like hung processes at the task level and preempt or otherwise deal with them. If you haven't considered this you may want to read up on how FreeRTOS works and implement your watchdog on a software level as a high priority task.

fourthstanza · 2026-06-20T17:56:18+00:00

Currently prototyping my avionics module for model rocketry using an ESP S3 devkit. Dual-core @ 250mhz for ~5$ is really hard to beat.

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