509engr

No, you're definitely not the only one who likes them. Some folks complain about them when they first go in, but they tend to figure it out.

WSDOT has been encouraging them for a few years now, and my town has several new roundabouts as a result -- and lots of other cities across the state are using them. They've made navigating those intersections way easier, reduced traffic "waiting times", and generally improved safety versus a lighted intersection. I'm glad they're continuing to find ways to make them work.

It seemed when I was growing up in NJ, the state DOT was taking out the giant roundabouts that they were famous for, and now in Washington, they're having a huge resurgence.

There might be a bit you can do if you have a few details, thanks to other documents being digitized and OCR'ed.

My great uncles both died in WWII and their service records were destroyed in this fire. I had been able to piece together a few details by googling their names (somewhat unique) with the services they were in, which lead me to digitized unit yearbooks and eventually other documents. For one of my great uncles, we found a unit report that included a redacted version of the silver star citation he earned.

When they first announced the Mindstorms kit, I was obsessed with the idea, but we were a Mac family. My parents somehow obtained a Robolab kit from the Lego educational catalog, which did run on Mac. I had so many good memories of building with that kit, but there were a number of plans I had found for Mindstorms that uses parts not included with the Robolab kit.

When I was in a freshman engineering class that used version 1 mindstorms kits a few years later, my fellow students were amazed at my understanding of how to build with the kits. It also help with another lab used LabVIEW.

I was in middle school around that same time, my parents got me the educational equivalent of Mindstorms (with RCX 1.0). We didn't have a PC and the educational edition came with a alternative LabView-based UI that ran on classic Mac OS. I remember seeing that article in Macworld and wanting to learn some of the other languages, but I never had much success. I can't say it was totally life altering, I was already headed down the path of an engineering career.

My college was still using the official Mindstorms sets for their intro to engineering classes, and so I recall finally getting my hands on the official Mindstorms software and finding it lacking. A classmate was using NQC to do it all, and his team let him do the programming. My team wasn't a fan of that approach so I stuck to the hardware.

I had a hard time finding a publication date for the original, but searching for it suggests 1979.

Wow, that is quite bizarre. I hadn't noticed the comment due to my browser extensions.

Mark Arax, the author of that article has a longer book, A Dreamt Land, on the subject of California agriculture and water, (probably the article is an excerpt) that is a really good read too. A little more up-to-date than Cadillac Desert, and more focused on California and the Central Valley.

Civil engineer here - had a similar situation in undergrad, with an electrical engineering prof trying several times to get me to switch based on my interests. There are a lot of opportunities to do coding and tech stuff in civil engineering, and I think working on big infrastructure projects is way more exciting than building a startup or the next great phone app. You should consider grad school, or at least take some grad level courses your senior year, if you want to learn to code and solve civil engineering problems. It isn't necessary, but grad school will give you classwork where you need to learn to code to solve them, and you'll have no problem finding a job if you can show programming and data analysis skills on your resume.

I currently work in water resources, maintaining a Monte Carlo models of systems of dams that is used to estimate changes to flood risk and other impacts - both as a result of climate change and changing regulations. The job feels a lot more like software engineering or tech support some days, so there seems to be a lot to learn from HN.

If you are looking to learn to code while doing civil engineering, or at least water resources, Python, R, Matlab, and even VBA for Excel are all commonly used. Focus on getting really good with one of them. A lot of the software I deal with is written in a combination of Java for the UI and FORTRAN for the computational engine, so having some background in those doesn't hurt, but definitely secondary.

(As for the original Ask HN post - I started reading HN a number of years ago after some more tech-oriented friends kept sending me links to discussions here - mostly stick around for vintage Mac shenanigans and stories, and the comments on them, but also often take a look at posts with career and leadership advice.)

I got three of these for a home NAS, not knowing any better. One failed within a day, the next failed within the first month, the third one lasted several years. For a long time, I didn't trust the NAS, making regular second backups (always a good idea) figuring it was the common point of failure, but the replacement drives were all working fine.

I had a similar experience with a USB-C hub I bought from a brand recommended by wirecutter (not the exact model as it was "replaced by a newer model". I plugged it into a brand new laptop and I got a warning about it drawing too much power, which persisted when I plugged several other devices. I returned the hub and have been getting spammed by these emails ever since. That has made me very wary of buying anything from Amazon now without a good recommendation from someone I personally know.

Wow, this still exists?! I remember trying to install MkLinux on a Performa 6116 that my parents no longer had a use for. I seem to recall it not having enough ram to run Xwindows, and the command line mystifying me. This at the same time as OS X 10.0 being released got me going for a long time on Unix-like systems.

The general responses to suggest getting off of voice modes either HF or VHF, and into digital or contesting has problems for people not living in a large city with multiple clubs to choose from. I’ve been an active ham for more than half of my life now and been finding the toxic culture in local ham club is frustrating, and real problem to recruiting younger people to the hobby.

I used to participate in the local club but quit after a few too many times hearing racist comments from the (not-octogenarian) club president with no reaction by other members, I decided to call it quits. That also means the tools and instruments I used to be able to borrow, or having a few extra sets of hands to help put up an antenna has gone away. And I won’t recommend the club to other people who have asked about getting into the hobby, at least not without telling them what to expect.

I still have a fellow ham I talk with who is a non-club member in the area, but he’s been in and out of the hobby as well for the last few years.

Sure this is one datapoint, but the value of having a local club with available knowledge, and tool and junk boxes to raid makes it a lot easier to stay active in the hobby.