I think you can drop the wannabe label. Of course you have a long way to go and much to learn but I think you are already an engineer, just one at the very start of what might be a great career.
ant6n 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
joenot443 37 minutes ago [-]
I'm Canadian as well and type this while wearing my ring, but I've come to accept that Americans use the term differently from Canadians and that's just fine. The Canadian definition is directly downstream of the Quebec bridge collapse, it's a pretty neat bit of Canadiana.
Just like writing favorite instead of favourite, while I'm here, I think the right thing to do is respect the customs of the country which welcomed me. It would be very ignorant of me to pretend I'm more of an engineer than my American colleagues with CS degrees.
I don't get the down voting. This dude is correct. An "engineer" is typical like a "doctor".
Yes I also carry the "system engineer" with me, and yes I have university background, but it's far far away from any serious engineering what's usually done by computer people.
I would also argue that an engineer more or less knows what he's doing and can predict the outcome. Most people I observe while they use a computer it's literally a monkey beating metal with flesh....
viccis 2 hours ago [-]
"Engineer" is a floating signifier and there's no reason to pretend it's anything otherwise in the US.
karambahh 1 hours ago [-]
It's a protected title in several european countries but I've never seen enforced, despite myself being part of an officially sanctionned body of engineers.
Afaik claiming to have an MD (for obvious reasons) or a PhD would land you in hot water much, much faster, despite technically being exactly the same "offense"
egeozcan 48 minutes ago [-]
Let's accept that engineering has 2 different uses and that's okay. If I tell people that I'm a civil engineer with nothing to show for it, it'd be as big of a problem like pretending to be an MD. For software engineering, however, you'd just be at the start of your career.
I think it's fine.
LtWorf 1 hours ago [-]
There's at least tens of people who aren't born in the USA.
50 minutes ago [-]
WillAdams 52 minutes ago [-]
Nice! Can it output SVG files for cutting w/ a CNC?
two_handfuls 8 hours ago [-]
What is it? Is this like a gear, where the output shaft turns at some fraction of the input shaft? Is better or worse than traditional toothed gears in some way?
tomilan 8 hours ago [-]
It acts like a gearbox, allowing you to sacrifice rotational speed for higher torque output. What makes this gearbox type special is their low backlash, multiple points of contact, and high efficiency.
WithinReason 41 minutes ago [-]
Might be worth adding that info to the README
cosmotron 8 hours ago [-]
They're pretty cool. They can be good in situations where you don't want any backlash and lots of torque. I believe they're very popular as actuators in robotics.
rustcleaner 2 hours ago [-]
Nice.
I'm an over-40 year old wannabe engineer too, except I didn't get as far as you on my little pet project: designing a 'universal' gear, based on professor Jack Phillips' work "General Spatial Involute Gearing." So far I can model the basic helicoids in Siemens NX, such that they touch along the ISA (Intermediate Screw Axis) which passes through the CDL (Center Distance Line) in between the gear axes. I have no clue how to proceed from there with actual involute teeth.
My idea is to at some point write an NX Open script/module, which takes in various parameters (like selecting the shaft/axes vectors; inputs ratio, pitch, etc.) and spits out something structured like my model.
fho 1 hours ago [-]
Good luck with that. NX is such a pain to use compared to other alternatives (commercial and free/open source). NX Open being even more painful because it's basically 90% guesswork.
rustcleaner 37 minutes ago [-]
I love NX (10-12), it feels very intuitive to me and it's absolutely rock solid compared to Inventor, Solid Edge, and SolidWorks, and it seems like it could run performantly on a literal potato (currently an offline Windows Server 2022 qube with 8GB RAM and 2 vCPUs, no GPU passthrough).
If only it were free for minors to play with as a toy, beats Minecraft as a builder!
fho 29 minutes ago [-]
Version 10-12 is 10-ish years ago. They switched to yearmonth (e.g. 2604) release names long ago.
Let's just say things changed since then.
There is also a difference between intuitive and familiar.
I learned to CAD on Fusion 360 with no formal education and it just worked. I can use FreeCAD sufficiently well to be productive (it really has become better over the years). I tried OnShape and just started working. I like using OpenSCAD and CadQuery...
... but I still struggle to get spline extrusions to work in NX because you just have to know which buttons to press in which order.
50 minutes ago [-]
koopuluri 9 hours ago [-]
you're not a wannabe! you're an engineer! you made something awesome. wishing you the best :).
shuwix 4 hours ago [-]
He's probably American.
So he's not engineer.
He's V8motoreer under the hood, a guy from the hood.
Izmaki 3 hours ago [-]
Don’t listen to people telling you not to post your age on the internet. This is solid work and you did this instead of being stuck in one of the hundreds of +1 dopamine traps in Roblox or yelling at other (often times much younger) kids in Fortnite like many of your peers did.
You did something meaningful, you even waited to share it with the world until version three, and you learned a ton doing it. Well done, dude!
You are on track ! at the age of 15 you building fantastic, just one word, "Keep Moving Sky is not the limit anymore"
49 minutes ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
ddlsmurf 9 hours ago [-]
try making something without AI too, it will be valuable
speed_spread 1 hours ago [-]
AI will be required to maintain the piles of tech crap we've built and that society now stands on. New generations are no longer as tech savvy, pushed toward being simple users and consumers. The rare individuals that develop curiosity for how things work have their work cutout and will need all the tools they can get to dig their way through layers of undocumented, organically grown software and hardware cruft left by "engineers" of lore.
zachlatta 8 hours ago [-]
Hey, you should join Hack Club! I was just at an event where a high schooler designed and built a continuous variable transmission (https://outpost.hackclub.com).
You’ll meet a ton of interesting, friendly teens who are all helping each other build awesome projects.
Cool project!
(Hack Club is a nonprofit and I’m the founder of it)
tomilan 8 hours ago [-]
I was actually looking to join hackclub, how should I approach it?
kaladin-jasnah 8 hours ago [-]
As a teenager that spent some time somewhat around Hack Club things, I felt that being a part of Hack Club pressured me to live live faster than I was ready to (like 16 year olds doing summer internships / cohabiting with their partners). I want to say a lot of the people I knew online on Hack Club Slack went to places like MIT, so I guess there's that, but there is some beauty in taking life more slowly. I also didn't want to be boxed into running my school's club with what Hack Club provided. I think they do good things (eg. Hack Club Bank helps students run events before they can financially) and I interacted with a lot of really cool people. But if it is anything like the past, I wanted to share this.
dyauspitr 4 hours ago [-]
I hope your username is not a spoiler for wind and truth. I’m about a third of the way through it.
bunchy7s 5 hours ago [-]
Thanks!
poopiokaka 7 hours ago [-]
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ethanhawksley 3 hours ago [-]
You can just join their Slack workspace (it's a bit like Discord) on their website: https://slack.hackclub.com/
Then in the #announcements channel you'll see all the different projects they're running, just pick and choose the ones that interest you.
I went to one of their meetups "Horizons Europa" last week and had a great time!
toplinesoftsys 6 hours ago [-]
Great project! Keep pushing, do not pay attention to anyone saying that AI will replace all software engineers.
48 minutes ago [-]
welcomezhangjun 7 hours ago [-]
I built this because I wanted a better way to use multiple AI models during development...
kbuchanan 9 hours ago [-]
I didn't even know what a cycloidal gearbox was! Good work—you've kicked off an exciting career.
jbs789 2 hours ago [-]
Nice work! Great to see you’re having fun with the projects. As we get older we focus on being productive. Never lose the creativity!
49 minutes ago [-]
cubrift 4 hours ago [-]
Seriously impressive, you should be proud of yourself! As another (software) engineer your age, being able to be creative is always a thing to be happy about.
48 minutes ago [-]
callbacked 8 hours ago [-]
you're an engineer by doing, whereas wannabes don't! very cool project
47 minutes ago [-]
bluelightning2k 3 hours ago [-]
You are a very talented 15 year old engineer. Not a wannabe. Just getting a head start on the imposter syndrome!
Welcome to the club
bunchy7s 9 hours ago [-]
it is pretty cool, but posting your age + an (likely) AI project on hacker news is probably a bad idea.
It's crazy that in 2018 a cellular automata written in JS by a 12 year old was considered special (which it is) and today, nobody would even bat an eye because you can just vibe code this without effort.
noduerme 4 hours ago [-]
It would still be impressive if it wasn't vibe coded.
Izmaki 3 hours ago [-]
Hold up, are you the type of person wanting to fire software teams because we can just ask the Product Owner to vibe code the new features?
el_io 3 hours ago [-]
No, I think the bar is just too high nowdays.
The projects I built as teenager spending weeks, it's just would take half hour of vibecoding now.
noduerme 3 hours ago [-]
I'm going through this. It's demoralizing. I want to spend weeks coding something cool. The idea of asking an AI to do it in 30 minutes is like... what's even the point. I know I can, so why bother. I'd rather go get a beer.
It's like getting all the cheat codes and then the game isn't fun anymore.
plastic-enjoyer 2 hours ago [-]
> Hold up, are you the type of person wanting to fire software teams because we can just ask the Product Owner to vibe code the new features?
No, and I don't even know how you can even read this from my post.
smalltalk7 4 hours ago [-]
This is a technical forum. One of the best traditions in engineering has always been taking beginners seriously and helping people who are trying to learn. Most of us are here because someone did the same for us. You come from a good place but I don't see why say a tech forum is a place you need to hide.
morelikeborelax 2 hours ago [-]
Those saying it's fine come from a good place. I come from a world where we see young people groomed, pursued and manipulated. There is no serious reason to posting your age as a minor on an adult forum.
ninalanyon 3 hours ago [-]
Why not?
shalom1112 3 hours ago [-]
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useiris 9 hours ago [-]
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nicechianti 5 hours ago [-]
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poopiokaka 7 hours ago [-]
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Sovereign34 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 11:47:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Just like writing favorite instead of favourite, while I'm here, I think the right thing to do is respect the customs of the country which welcomed me. It would be very ignorant of me to pretend I'm more of an engineer than my American colleagues with CS degrees.
Afaik claiming to have an MD (for obvious reasons) or a PhD would land you in hot water much, much faster, despite technically being exactly the same "offense"
I think it's fine.
I'm an over-40 year old wannabe engineer too, except I didn't get as far as you on my little pet project: designing a 'universal' gear, based on professor Jack Phillips' work "General Spatial Involute Gearing." So far I can model the basic helicoids in Siemens NX, such that they touch along the ISA (Intermediate Screw Axis) which passes through the CDL (Center Distance Line) in between the gear axes. I have no clue how to proceed from there with actual involute teeth.
My idea is to at some point write an NX Open script/module, which takes in various parameters (like selecting the shaft/axes vectors; inputs ratio, pitch, etc.) and spits out something structured like my model.
If only it were free for minors to play with as a toy, beats Minecraft as a builder!
Let's just say things changed since then.
There is also a difference between intuitive and familiar.
I learned to CAD on Fusion 360 with no formal education and it just worked. I can use FreeCAD sufficiently well to be productive (it really has become better over the years). I tried OnShape and just started working. I like using OpenSCAD and CadQuery...
... but I still struggle to get spline extrusions to work in NX because you just have to know which buttons to press in which order.
He's V8motoreer under the hood, a guy from the hood.
You did something meaningful, you even waited to share it with the world until version three, and you learned a ton doing it. Well done, dude!
You’ll meet a ton of interesting, friendly teens who are all helping each other build awesome projects.
Cool project!
(Hack Club is a nonprofit and I’m the founder of it)
Welcome to the club
Project looks cool
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17871313
The projects I built as teenager spending weeks, it's just would take half hour of vibecoding now.
It's like getting all the cheat codes and then the game isn't fun anymore.
No, and I don't even know how you can even read this from my post.