HCIdivision17

Fun trivia: road damage follows a fourth power law. [0] Double the weight and you do sixteen times the damage.

[0] Link to link: http://www.vabike.org/vehicle-weight-and-road-damage/

Oh no, my estimates were really in favor of the parent's comparison. That $600k is a lowest-bidder minimum, expecting to redo in a month when it fails.

I'd be interested to know more about the breakdown, and I'd bet at least some municipalities are required to share it. A well trained road crew is likely pretty expensive, and as others noted, there's a lot more to a road than a driveway. Most driveways I've seen are largely cement planks, whereas a road is layers of differing materials to ensure frequent use doesn't destroy it too quickly.

As for bridges. Eugh. I dunno. Those things are often crazy expensive. I wouldn't be surprised though, since that bridge is rather large and suffers a lot more wear and tear than NASA. I mean, they just need to punch a few one-time use rockets into space, but that bridge has to deal with thousands of semis. Space is a nasty place, but I'm betting thousands of trucks barreling over is harder to deal with year in and out.

I thought it was at least going to be something interesting about US infrastructure, but it's really focused on NYC. Unsurprisingly, the US does not place getting costs down for subways to be one of its higher priorities. Anecdata, admittedly, but I've seen very little talk about controlling union costs for MTA workers in the rural midwest; those poor guys are supporting a subway system that's barely there!

Really, though, infrastructure stuff is neat, and we probably should start fixing it up. The main problem is the size of the US infrastructure is outstandingly staggering. There's an article [0] that's an argument for pouring money back into the highway funds (and the like), and the cash involved is worse than astronomical. At the very least, I didn't know there were over 600000 bridges in the US... I honestly don't know where we put them all. (Are overpasses included?)

[0] http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/public/index.cfm/rep... I don't go to senate.gov much, so I'm guessing this is pretty partisan, but there's a crapton of followup links that are at least interesting.

You might need to be amazed at the savings at scale. The land area covered by a few city blocks of road compared to a driveway is pretty large. The $1.5M is likely a pretty good buy.

Napkin calc: assuming a driveway that's 20 feet wide and 30 feet long, the area will be 600 feet^2. The typical residential road's going to be something like 30 feet wide (enough for a parked car and two opposing lanes with comfort) and a guess at a block being like 1/20 of a mile, or 250 feet; that gives each city block of road about 7500 feet^2. So guessing conservatively, about one city block is probably at least 10 times larger than the driveway.

And that's before the actual road complexity. A city road also likely has to account for sewage, powerlines, telecom cables, drainage, etc. There's also a trade-off in road design: your friend likely never wants to build his driveway again, so he'll want something permanent like cement. But the city may want to make different trade-off; blacktop can be more easily maintained and expanded and upgraded than pavement, but also costs more in the long run (but pavement is more expensive up front).

Due making a backup shortly before a breaking glitch, it actually happened a whole bunch of times across a whole bunch of computers. Sublime's licensed to the user, not the machine, so over a few months while I was setting up a slew of machines I kept forgetting about it when I restored my app directory. Add that one of the packages would freak out when curl wasn't already installed first and it was a mess. Sublime would start, update, screw up the interface, popup, and then I'd have to close it and restart a few times until the package manager got it up to a stable point.

I say huge because it was god damn irritating. In a giant checklist of stuff I was worried about, it was always an afterthought that caught me by surprise. When the artifacting completely craps out the side bar such that the folder tree no longer updates when files change, you can't even tell if the files are still there.

EDIT: To really drive the point home: this happened a whole lot. The above is a story of woe and sadness, but the real kicker was simply the autoupdate as noted elsewhere by `jbrooksuk. For a long time I used the Soda Theme [0], one of the top packages on Package Control. It had a wierd glitch with hotkeys and would end up reloading shortly after startup. It was possible that it would garf things up even on restart as a result (possibly as a race condition such that if no updates were performed, it restarted fast enough to not bork whatever drew the iterface). I used Soda theme for years, but have recently switched to Seti and enjoy the change quite a bit.

[0] https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Theme%20-%20Soda

[1] https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Seti_UI

When I said "better", I should have said merely that Sublime's improved, not as a qualitative statement for comparison to others :)

I pretty strictly follow the idea that you pick something that works for you and use it. I happen to be familiar with Sublime, but man, I really like IntelliSense when I'm in SSMS (or when I did Excel VBA hacking - don't judge me!). Honestly, until Sublime Text 2's vast improvement in startup times it wasn't my go-to editor, and oddly it's what kept me off Atom the few times I gave it a cursory whirl (my previous alternative? Notepad++). I have zero doubt Atom will eventually be just as snappy - heck it may even be now; I haven't checked.

That all said, I think the VS Code team is going to eat everyone's lunch within the next few years if no one watches them and keeps up. And my money is everyone does try to keep up and we're left with a new browser war situation where we have lots of ultrahigh quality options!

There's a sweetness to that sentiment, but I think it's misplaced. I mean, Jon Skinner has technically been working on this thing for over a decade. It's this guy and a couple other people polishing it for years; saying it's like Microsoft is like calling git-annex just another Dropbox.

And don't forget: this is a product and a business. If someone comes up to eat your lunch, you can roll over and die or adapt and improve. We've come a bit full circle in the Complaints Department here: when Atom was first coming out, a vocal lot decried it was just a Sublime Text rip-off picking on the little guy. Turns out it's a pretty good editor! Sublime's got a few updates and it's just perfunctorily playing catch-up? Well, I liked it before, and now it's better, so... I think that's pretty good.

Looking at the change list, it notes that there won't be artifacting with theme changes any more? If so that's freaking huge. For a while there it would start up, the package manager would update stuff, and then the interface would sorta crap itself. A quick reload fixed it, but damn annoying.

Would you suggest switching to the dev builds? I really wouldn't mind being on the bleeding edge if it meant getting fixes like that sooner.

I really haven't seen any correlation there at all. Sublime's had sporadic and at-their-own-pace updates since before Atom came out.

And... Why would it be sad?! Two excellent solutions competing to make a better product is pretty much the opposite of any sense of the word sad I can think of. It's great to have choices that are under active development.

I think what makes it even more mildly amusing is how to deal with it. I remember shaking magazines out and pulling the cards out before reading. If you didn't, then the pages would get flipped by the siffer subscription card's paper stock and you'd be unable to read some article. (Literally, the page would just start flipping over - it was so goddam infuriating sometimes when the card couldn't easily be removed because it was perforated and left a little tab behind that prevented the magazine from ever laying flat on the table!)

I started reading Ignition! and it is a hoot. I really get the impression that the rocket fuel scientists fixated, not because of personal issues (though hilarity ensues there), but because the search space is damn large (at least while still discovering how fuels interacted). Or worse, it just takes a damn long time to even properly test. So when you found something promising, you really dug into it.

It's a pretty big deal. When everything starts at urgent and gets worse from there, people will just rescale the noise to be more understandable. It's just like the joke about sitting down and assigning points to a task and finding out everything is 100 or all bugs are critical or all tasks are top priority.

The meta joke here is that is some ways every security issue is critical, but if everyone is immune to the fear then escalation will feel like the only choice. Either you slowly discharge that stress immunity by being sensibly mellow, or you start packing heat to 'convince' everyone to reboot NOW. (There's probably room for some amount of finesse between these two extremes.)

EDIT: There's two terrible responses that seem to come out of this. Either no one gives a damn, or no one gives a damn and just does whatever you say. The first is bad because nothing gets fixed, and the second is bad for `red_admiral's reasons (users treat anything that looks like a security rant as a EULA and just do whatever it says).

IANAL, so I'm hoping I'm understanding this right: because Okrand wrote the dictionary, and in it claimed that he learned it from an actual Klingon, he may not now say he invented it? The argument kinda being, if the language is real, and he wrote a non-fiction authoratative book on it... then he can't be inconsistent about the origins?

It's hard for me to wrap my head around it, but it's hilariously clever if I'm reading it right.

Like many of these types of inquiry, the details matter. For example: cold fusion is real. It's just not terribly useful for powering a city. But you can use it as a neutron source for generating the short half-life radiological treatments for cancer [1].

For this drive, what we have is an experiment that begs a theory. There's something interesting going on, and so far it eludes easy explanations. Quite possibly we'll get an innovation out of it in experimental setup, or best case real, easily verifiable thrust is detected. Chances are there won't be any new physics, but rather a very clever engineering exploit of what was already known (but not properly applied).

Enjoy the failures in science; it means we're actually trimming the dead ends carefully instead of assuming all innovation is low hanging fruit. There's a lot of bunk out there, but there's also tons of neat edge cases to map out!

[1] A friend's husband works in one of those labs. I forget the mechanism at play (I think it was cavitation), but it was room temperature fusion generating neutrons. It'd never be self sustaining for power, but still incredibly useful.

Thanks for the link - that comment is great.

I gotta quote one line that is just cool, though:

  4. A test at 50 W of power during which an 
  interferometer (a modified Michelson device) 
  was used to measure the stretching and compressing 
  of spacetime within the device, which produced 
  initial results that were consistent with an 
  Alcubierre drive fluctuation.

Which is just really cool. The followup sums up my fascination with the whole thing niceley:

  Test #4 was performed, essentially, on a whim 
  by the research team as they were bouncing ideas 
  off each other, and was entirely unexpected. They 
  are extremely hesitant to draw any conclusions based 
  on test #4, although they certainly found it interesting.

That right there is science in progress: a hint of something interesting, a test leading to another test leading to another, each interesting in their own right. It's still not clear if something spectacular is going on, but I think it's undeniably interesting. Careful reexamination can yeild all manner of useful insights!

(Off topic, but along the lines of closer examination, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9020065 for how some careful (and extensive!) experimentation helped illuminate sodium's reaction with water. Not just how much work was needed to tease out the details!)

As TheOtherHobbes notes elsewhere in this thread, your first impression may have been fair. The Spectrum logo is - at least to me - certainly reminiscent of spectral bands stripped to the minimum idea. Likewise, a technologist is likely to see the MITP logo and grok the various visual puns linked to barcodes, books, graphs, tape, 1s/0s, gear teeth, precision, and all manner of other tech thingies. What exactly each person sees may be different, but it sure feels appropriate.

(Side note: I feel that having to stare and figure out the logo really accentuates that MIT hacker mentality. It's a small, clever joke or puzzle, and that feeling of "oh I get it" seems superbly appropriate here. That confusion? That sort of exclusive humor/cleverness is classic hacker in-joke material.)

In a similar way, letting a known something person speak means they're not intolerant of something. I mean, yeah, you could make that argument, but it sure doesn't seem substantial or useful. That's the point of Xyism at the end: it doesn't have much to do with functional programming , and functional programming is what the conference is explicitly about.

And there is an explicit threat against assholery: perform it and you'll be excluded. Don't and you'll have the same protection any other person has.

It is implicitly not about a very large range of things, namely mostly stuff that isn't functional programming.

I respectfully note that their conclusion is the opposite: that you can separate the person from the talk. That an informative talk well spoken by an asshole is still informative. And, well, the speaker may still be a jerk. But the conference wants to have an air of professionalism, and therefore you should go to be informed, not as a vote in a popularity contest of any kind.

They also seem to have a strong intolerance of the practice of assholery. So should anyone overstep, it sure seems like retribution will be swift. So if people behave, then there should be no worry: people are expected to behave. And if anyone bullies - in any way - expect moderation with extreme predjudice (that is a great phrase in English).

There may be many closet assholes out there, but we don't bar them, since we expect people to behave by default. Expect the best of people and prepare to be temporarily impressed or disappointed.

It is such a cool principle. I think it can be extended to all manner of fields. As a process engineer, I am convinced that the best machine operators are the ones actively doing nothing. The active bit is key: they must be alert, watchful, understanding, and for-God's-sake don't push nothing unless you need to.

Somewhere along the way operators think that if they don't push a button every fifteen minutes they aren't earning their pay (I blame bad management and production pressure). So when in doubt, look busy. It has awful and confusing effects on processes, leading to long term hard-to-diagnose noise in otherwise stable systems.

I think the same principle applies here. We want vigilant, patient, and wise did managers. Not just super active and excitable ones.

I'll second `oaktowner's comment: the adds fit right in. They fit in naturally and it feels curated. If this is what we were immersed in, web ads would be a much more relevant. the ads don't smack you and stand out as ADS! And instead blend in nicely.

Stick with it - it really pays returns down the line. Specifically, do some real soul-crushing busy work for a while (Excel is a good place to start) and then realize that you can automate large chucks of that in just a few minutes. It'll take days/hours at first, but eventually hours/minutes.

It's hard to beat the feeling of having a computer make your life easier. There's a triumph in it.

Is there any way this is bad? I am honestly having a hard time not getting thrilled over it. I want to be cynical and worried, but hot damn this seems awesome. Getting that alphabet soup of utilities to be useful natively on Windows without Cygwin or `git bash` is a pain (and usually lags out of date; nevermind the startup lag too).

Just having curl, md5sum, and apt alone is a thrill and a half!

Worse yet, you could talk at the same time as the other person! Carrying on a conversation with my mom is like talking at that fancy riot mike from a few years ago [0]. If you don't have a perfectly negotiated rhythm, you're gonna talk over the other person, cutting them off, missing part of their sentence, and then begin a flood of repeat/acks before starting again. It's bloody idiotic, and my mom is convinced she's just terrible at talking to people, when instead for the first time in her life the phone is too dumb to do the job right; she thinks she's terrible with tech, and it's really just dumb machines failing her expectations.

And never mind the loss of fidelity so you can't tell someone's tone or not.

Almost makes me wanna just chuck this miracle slab of supercomputing glass. plonk

[0] Seems like it's called the Delayed Auditory Feedback effect. Some researchers built a directional mike/megaphone combo that basically stupefies anyone it's pointed at into silence.

There seems to be a signal of intent there; some people are accidentally senseless jerks (including yours truly), and a simple reprimand is enough to tone it back. By contrast, the sort this seems to be aimed at would likely scoff it off. I guess like "Hey man, don't be a jerk" followed by either "Oh sorry, didn't mean any offense" or "Hey! I'm not a jerk!"

Like many moderation policies, I guess we can just hope the moderators are, well, moderate.

I think that's a fine opinion. It's an active choice to not get involved, and I think dynamic partitioning is a good way to handle things (dissent and go one's own way).

It's a bit ironic, since I hadn't really known about the conference, and it sounds really cool. After all, I can just not go to that speaker - whoever he is (the controversy really doesn't interest me) - and see some of the other neat talks. I think as far as conference prices go, it's not too bad, but I wasn't planning on it (and there's always the ever-larger cost of travel/lodging), so I suspect I won't see it =/

Your last line there is the key, and the filter by which we can see if that comic is worrying or wise.

HN has a rather brutal philosophy in flagging/downvoting items lacking substance and shadowbanning troll-ish folk; it seems to work ok and is usually not too sinister (and when it is, human intervention/moderation can often help). By contrast, large communities like states and national institutions can - with just a hint and a nod - inflict surprisingly chilling effects throughout communities of millions.

So where do we draw the line? I dunno. Whereever we draw it, it's got to be parametric with enough inputs to take into account at least the rough subtleties of the situation. Because the comic is right: I don't need to put up with an asshole's bullshit, but I also don't want to destroy them. Just, you know, tone it down a smidge and stop being a jerk.

I'm fairly passive. Normally I do that by ignoring them, changing the channel, or just avoiding the website. Rarely I'll actively flag or downvote (ugh, so hamfisted). And sometimes, I just go away if they take root. With high-signal web analytics, tracking, stats, and other social-buzz things, my avoidance may actually be logged and noted. Maybe I help starve out what I consider noise, thus boosting what I consider signal.

What if a lot of people in a community are just outraged? Or are very sensitive to easily become outraged? I think that's where things get underdamped fast, and where your worries come into play. My only thought is to starve it of energy 'till it settles down, but we've seen enough self-sustaining bullshit storms that I bet passive resistance doesn't work much anymore for that.

EDIT: speling

Hey, if you're gonna be selfish, fail hedonistic, not dead. Find the stuff you like and live for that; if you can't seem to like anything, well, put it off until you do again. No point giving up before you figure out what you're missing out on. Dying ignorant of what makes life worth living is just the worst kind of tragedy.

I don't want to suggest vice is great. Just that as far as alternatives go, maybe you can channel that selfishness :) after all, you can always recover from a vice you enjoy (and even repent if that is what worries you like the GP comment), but it's really hard to recover from death.

Millions and millions of people manage to get along through their lives. See what they have that you don't. I'd bet it's prolly some neurotransmitter or chemistry, but maybe exercise or a chocolate deficiency (I found I needed annoyingly stubborn/complicated problems to work on to distract me). Hard to tell over the Internet. See a doctor about medication or therapy or diet or something until you did something that works.

Then see you you feel. (This is very much a heads you win, tails flip again sort of thing, and it works pretty well as a stalling tactic :)

I'll be frank: I am quite possibly alive today due to guilt that family would inherit a burdensome debt. There is something sublimely lousy about wanting a way out so badly and yet even that isn't an option.

Wanting to commit suicide has been likened to being in a trapped building: no one really wants to die, but jumping out under your own terms now sure seems better than burning alive slowly.

And then you go and find the damn window is jammed and you're really trapped because even suicide is not an option.

That's how I felt. And it turned out ok. (Not great, but really anywhere is up :) I certainly don't and didn't feel the same as you for the same reasons - totally different life and brain chemistry, I bet - but the algebra works out the same. Stay alive and endure a bit longer, and maybe you'll find something that helps you cope and get a handle on things. The cool game-theoretic bit is that this is always valid. It's always worth putting off suicide longer, every moment of every day. You can die and end with naught (or in your faith that's a pretty brutal negative), or you can risk a few years more and still end for naught OR something positive. It doesn't even need to be very positive. Just beat the trivial null case of no-more-life and you come out ahead. Do that for a couple days, a couple months, put it off for a few years, and maybe the habit of wanting to live sticks.

And hey - video games are great. They keep me distracted, my friends in touch, and they're only getting better (despite what the old curmudgeons say). Stick around for a few years to at least see where the consumer VR stuff goes. Could be worth the wait ;)

As so many others note, keep trying stuff! You will, eventually, find a therapy that works for you. Me, some friends, coworkers, family - just a lot of people - have battled internally with depression. And we all cope a bit differently. Prolly because we all have something a bit different.

I never took medication. I think that was a mistake that added years to my recovery. I'm still not sure I'm a person yet (but I'm optimistic about it). I never had the crushing sadness many relate to depression, but rather the emotional void variant [0]; I can't imagine how crippling it must be to not only fake happiness, but to also have to compensate for genuine unhappiness... I hope you find what you need soon. I have an account at gmail (see username) if you feel safe venting to an anonymous person; just keep looking for something that gives you the contrast to see what feeling normal is like (not even feeling good! Just normal. Life is sometimes brutally sad for long periods. And that's ok. But if you can't imagine feeling differently then maybe the mind's chemistry has wedged itself.)

Anyhow, if anything else comes out of this rather large thread of responses, you ain't alone. It's hard to slog through and find what works for you, be it a next gen medicine, meditation, or an hour on the motorcycle every day, you'll find the thing(s) eventually. Just slog through it a bit longer.

Also: we seem to only have the one life, so procrastinate on ending it. You've a worst case of dying of old age or accident, then, and you may just be surprised to be in a better place a few years from now. Being able to look back is certainly a luxury I cherish, personally.

[0] http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-par...

It's so silly, but this is to me the best, most consice write up of depression I've stumbled upon. YMMV. But my friends and I were in tears laughing over it - but over different parts. Depression nails a lot of people in different ways, so keep trying to fid the fix for you. It really does exist.

Let's be fair here. Bejewelled is the crack-cocaine of simple addictive games. Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Pinball are mere gateways to Bejewelled.