suboto
1. Things have always been this way.
2. Read the guidelines. They have always been this way.
3. Follow the guidelines. You are off-topic.
4. Email us at hn@ycombi etc.
Been here for much longer than most, frankly.
I mean, I guess we all just pick up our ball and go to lobsters? HN has turned to dregs and every time we call it out we are warned. So of what use is it than to mindlessly ramble with burner accounts and nothing to lose? The old “even Reddit is better” holds true. Oh no, I guess I broke the guidelines by comparing to Reddit. That’s a paddlin’.
Try fucking moderating the site once in awhile, ffs.
Tomhow getting into a back and forth with me, ignoring what I’m saying and without at all reading the room is on brand. Hold on let me email you instead, Tom. I wasn’t clear the first five thread levels. Yeah that’ll do it.
I don’t think anyone truly gives a shit about HN enough to have a concentrated attack effort. But Israel, China, Russia, Ukraine and Palestine are all hot topics. Fuck em. Nuke them all from the orbit.
Attack the argument, not the individual.
Take Troubleshooting Analog Circuits by Bob Pease. He throws something janky at you to see if you can intuit what could the culprits be. He then elaborates the ways in which things can go wrong. This is an introductory chapter. Many books do this, it’s not perfect but it works. It’s a book about troubleshooting that starts with asking you to troubleshoot, and then helps you to do so by explaining how and why. Hard to argue with that.
I’m not against the book, but it does seem mostly like trivia. The accompanying blog posts are insightful, though the author spends a lot of time showing how much they know rather than explaining a concept to the student - and yes, there is a difference between the two. There are a number of instances I came across of this, and other texts are better written in this regard. If I didn’t already know the stuff the author is talking about, I would need to read up another resource on it. So then what is the point? Even Dave Jones’ videos have more use because he’s right there with an oscilloscope and voltmeter to show you what’s going on. Tricks tips for “young players” etc.
While I don’t expect one book to teach it all, I would like to see how it compares to the current crop of books and why is it better. The sample chapter left me very unimpressed and the book looks like it’s meant to be more for a coffee table and less for actual hands on usage. I don’t see a way that someone would put this into practice without an accompanying practice/lab book. Otherwise, it reads like trivia that showcases how much the author knows. Great, I guess?
Speaking of covers, Open Circuits: Inner Beauty of Electronics has a much more honest yet intelligent cover to it. Each page is both informational and extremely well done. Someone who has no knowledge of electronics or electricity can walk away learning something because it shows how things physically work with photos. The visual itself is almost self explanatory as a still image of different materials and how they are arranged. In other words, it has information density that’s both attractive and impactful.
My actual picks, are the likes of Floyd or Melvino, the Charles Platt one that has loads of circuits to build, and of course the clumsy but informative Forrest Mims series of books. Then you can get into Elicia White’s Embedded or any other assortment of more advanced books on power electronics etc.
Open to be proven wrong but yeah. I would have expected more because I don’t know of any book on this subject other than Art of Electronics and maybe Microelectronics by Sedra (or Razavi) that gets this much praise. Yet it started getting this praise before it was even released.
Bashing AI is fun except even good old Sam Ben-Yaakov is coming around to appreciate how useful it is to pedagogy.
I remain skeptical.