HCIdivision17

I suspect that it acts as a sort of diffuser. Any source of ignition within the grill has to pass through it to induce an explosion. The mesh allows the heat to spread out more evenly, making the temperature at any one point on the mesh lower (the energy is still there, but likely isn't concentrated enough to cause ignition). As a result, with respect to the flame, the little burning particles from the wick need to get through the grill to ignite the gasses outside the cage, and the fine mesh makes that less likely too (I think microscopic burning embers are surprisingly likely to bump into the mesh, since fine wires have high drag aerodynamics and so the air will cause the gases to linger near the mesh; a finer, denser wire mesh just amplifies the effect that way while still letting out much of the light).

I bet it's not failsafe, but it undoubtedly is a vast improvement on an open flame.

I was a little skeptical - after all was it really tricking me into thinking it's 3D? Or is this just an odd visual artifact? Then I read:

  Notice how the shaft now seems tilted to the left? 
  (Did you just catch yourself shifting your head to 
  the right? Convincing isn't it?!!)

And I realized I had just moved my head to the right to center the shaft without realizing it. I laughed out loud when he caught me on it.

My, where history's path takes us. I'm not really sure how to describe this feeling; a clever hacker put a boggled cat and pickles on a star field and it's clearly missing lasers.

Like, I get there's a source GIF that inspired it, and lazoring pickles with a cat has that sort of pseudo randomness like 'purple monkey dishwasher'. But I still think it's strange that it stands out as an omission over, say, talking wrenches. (I think the awestruck cat is fine just how it is; just flummoxed over how legitimate your quip was.)

And if you missed out on this phenomenal deal, you can experience it retro-vicariously through the magic of The Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151127130402/https://store.car...

This illustrates the almost unfathomable scope involved here. Each accomplishment is at least an order of magnitude or more harder than the last, and each one is truly impressive on their own. Yet each shadows the last!

Pretty cool times for space; I'm stoked for what comes next!

Heh, I think it's actually useful. Cross-posting is sort of a form of intellectual cross-pollination; some people are allergic, but others appreciate the second chances. I don't read those other forums, so I'd have missed out on that little nugget.

And I tried to make that last sentence a garden path one, to keep the comment on topic, but jeez it's hard to break the habit of avoiding them. I suspect it's deeply ingrained in me to an instinctual level by my 11th grade rhetoric teacher. (Her whole goal was to, and I quote, "make our insides scrunch when we saw a comma splice." Most who took her class would agree her curriculum was a resounding success, even after she also taught us to break the rules.)

For many of my use cases, this is a handy workflow. CTEs are just perfect for iteratively building up a query to what I need. Once it's done, I can either package the whole shebang or break out the really useful bits into views.

Notably, MSSQL does optimize across CTEs, so there's not as much pressure to break out to views on that platform. And if you're feeling especially perverse, you can make a CTE a view, which sorta... sporks the problem.

Just because there has to be an obligatory link to his phenomenal website:

http://www.kleinbottle.com/

Cliff Stoll has to be one of the most genuine and wonderful mad engineers out there. His work is just one gem of brilliant hackery after another.

If you try to play that way, it's actually pay-to-lose-money. In EvE, the rule is never fly anything you're not willing to lose, and the same applies to SC. After all: why would anyone complain about the opportunity to blap an unskilled carebear's expensive ship when they can collect a bounty on it?

The main difference with SC seems to just be the insurance policies. In EvE the policy will cover much of the raw material cost of the ship, which is prolly going to be a painful fraction of the total outfitting. SC has the Lifetime insurance which guarantees you'll have a hull to fly... but not much else. It may even be possible to insure fittings and cargo, but again, that's a gold sink in-game.

It took me a while to figure out why I kept coming across references to the Cheeseshop. Turns out that's why PyPI has that little quote at the bottom.

https://wiki.python.org/moin/CheeseShop

I won't lie. I was hoping for leads on other games. Relativity looks fantastic. It's an odd thing: I have no idea if it looks fun to play or not, but I have no doubt that it will be worth whatever price simply for the atmosphere and style. A spectrum runs where a game can be fun for its mechanics or enjoyable for it aesthetics. For me, I suppose I'm willing to pay $10 for anything that does something well. If Relativity is merely an interactive work of abstract art, I suspect I would be happy with that. And if the game is merely a few shapes and lines with a fun mechanic, I feel the same.

(And thanks also for the lead on Witness - a Myst by The Guy Who Did Braid? I can't see that disappointing (and no idea how I hadn't heard of it yet!).)

Then there's stuff like this. Where there just aren't that many games like it. Echochrome, Antichamber, Monument Valley, Oquonie, and Fez feel like they're in a similar category, and I would happily throw more money at clever games like that. I'm super stoked about The Museum of Simulation Technology and Miegakure for the same reason.

To go along with another commenter who notes that if you've fans, you're set: if you work in a sufficiently difficult or niche genre with a following, you've got a head start. I'll buy damn near any space-warpy game just on the off-chance I get that fix for a clever and unexpected plot twist; in this case probably a literal shift in perspective.

Edit: spelling and +1 game

The Beginner's Guide is... Uncomfortable. It's an unusual game that kinda needs to be experienced and, well, sat through. But yeah, I felt it was just barely passing muster for ten bucks. It felt incomplete or missing some critical piece of context, and so it seemed to fall short of whatever it was trying to be (unless that's what it wants us to think... But that way Dragons lie).

After playing it, I stumbled across a YouTube comment on Christopher Odd's play-through that linked to a talk the author gave to some college students a year or so ago. It fits so well, I'm calling out spoiler warning. But it's a fine chaser that - at least for me - cleansed the palette and let the game settle. Warning: it's pretty uncomfortable too, but I think it's a damn sight less gnostic.

[0] http://livestream.com/accounts/6845410/gamesnow/videos/83818...

And of course - for those who need Homestuck explained - that's a great throwback to the SimCity games, specifically here where the loading screens would often include nonsensical things like the famouse "reticulating splines". (IIRC, a lot of the Maxis games of Yore would play off that joke.)

(And thanks - now the Sburb loading theme is stuck in my head again!)

I remember seeing a video as a kid of a spider silk blanket flattening a bullet shot at it. Is this parka as puncture resistant?

I think this compares nicely to Asimov's essay on how wrongness is relative. In it he argues that as ideas become more accurate, it's not reasonable to say the predecessors are simply wrong. Likewise, as we develop new ideas, the mass of invalid ideas is also a part of the foundation that holds up what we now know. To me, without the contrasting experiments and failed theories, our current ideas would seem suspiciously successful and lucky; but if we look at the mountains of counter-results and lame explanations, it's easy to have confidence that we're at least heading vaguely in the right direction. (And it also teaches about the hubris of just how much data can match an incorrect idea!)

[0] http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

Reading this, I was struck by how it reminded me of a talk that slowly warped and wrapped a statement to build up the Y-combinator. The process takes a self-referential function and slowly works the self out of it.

Honestly, I'm not at all sure turning a function anonymous is actually similar to making a sentence passive, but maybe re-watching that video now I'll have that je ne sais quoi that'll let me actually grok the process.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs

You're technically correct, but you're really underplaying how goddam troublesome it can be.

Just a couple days ago, I tried to add a tool to my PATH and it wouldn't stick because both Intel and Microsoft decided that their utility needed not only both Program Files and Program Files (x86) for each (doubling their PATH usage), but Intel also decided to arbitrarily use positively uselessly long directory names. As in, I actually think it's plausible Intel specifically did it to screw over PATH usage.

Infuriatingly, the hard PATH limit is after any environment variables have been expanded, meaning there's no reasonable way to compress the path down. (Never mind that it also only expands variables less than the string 'PATH'.) In the end, I used DIR to find what the 8dot3 representation of each repeated or long directory was.

Now I have enough free characters, but no fracking idea exactly where they point. It's the sort of crazy that I really thought would have been lic'd by now.

Edit: I forgot to note that the hard limit is a truncation. So while you can happily add to the PATH variable in the (now out-dated) dialog, the actual console won't see all of it. I had moved folders around before my rant above such that my final PATH exactly ended on "\node\bin". It's sort of a weird game of PATH golf at this point for me.

I remember finding the beach that seems to harken back to Ico. The ambiguity is a thrill: there's enough to remind you, but never quite enough to prove it. And so you have an odd win-win scenario, where you can enjoy just finding something interesting, but maybe there's more to it. When you walk away from the game, there's a little part of you that thinks there's still more to be had, that the game hasn't ended yet. It helps stave off that bittersweetness of winning mentioned near the start.

It also helps that there really were some great hidden bits. The game is riddled with wonderfully hidden special spots. (If I remember correctly, it's a bad idea to eat the fruit in the garden at the top of the temple.)

When Myst Online: Uru Live got its second wind, a similar air followed the gameplay. Everything could be a puzzle or a plot with each new update. I always felt the Cyan developers knew they had to make puzzles that not only stumped a player, but a whole community of fans. I had enormous amounts of fun searching for and - in the end inventing - puzzles there. To this day I like to think Jalak was totally a puzzle, and not just a surprisingly involved gizmo.

As an engineer who worked in a couple plants and focused on QC and the like, I damn near have an allergic reaction when any level of management says something like that. I immediately assumed that sort of conversation took place, and it's a strong signal something unethical is afoot - or at least a call for something unethical. ("I'm not saying you should ignore the samples, but sometimes you get different results if you test again, you know?")

The economy doesn't follow natural law, or - in many ways both literal and figurative - any laws at all.

If you think it should, then it'll appear to violate all sorts of principles all the time. In some cases it behaves like a closed system (employment in countries), in others it's an open system (companies). Some cases money is conserved (double entry booking), in others money behaves more like a Banach-Tarski ball (think bank money multipliers).

The need to elastically control money supply is one of the reasons the Fed exists.

There's a great piece by NPR a few years ago on the topic where they explain the process:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/08/26/129451895/how-t...

In the little video, it looks like a lot of it was just cannibalized parts. I'd be interested in the actual thought process that built the monstrosity (and I say that as a person who just loves that sort of gizmo work). When I was his age, I didn't know anything about proper electronics, and so I only took stuff apart and tried to figure out how to get it combined. I remember one of the big problems I had was figuring out enclosures, and frankly a $5 box from Target really would be the perfect thing; the other stuff likewise followed similarly.

Think of it as the Git-R-Done philosophy, like installing Postgres for a single two column table. It ain't elegant, but I wouldn't make a kid feel bad for trying.

It's likely worth noting that the shuttle has a famously robust computer system. The Challenger was related to an engineering flaw in the mechanical design of the system.

I forget my source, but IIRC the computer system actually noticed the pressure drop from the fuel lines (what with the exploding) and started the shutdown process, spinning down the turbos before the system was forcefully disassembled. Takes a while to turn off the turbos; a few hundred milliseconds really isn't enough time...

[0] Obligatory link to the Feynman report

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyfeature_...

[1] A cool article on the software running the shuttle

http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

Just a note that the article (perhaps inadvertently) confuses a little: industrial manufacturing must be highly routinized and boring if it's working well. Tolerances are very tight for well made manufactured goods, since they have to be to be assembled into larger, more complex goods. Let an operator get creative with a running process, and all bets are off [0].

Besides! People are also terrible at that sort of work, so it's better to automate the job and have the people supervise machines. The machines do the terrible soul-crushing tedious work and the worker oversees the hiccups and glitches. (Machines are pretty lousy supervisors, and are difficult to program supervisory roles in the messy situations a lot of manufacturing happens in.)

And keep in mind that's for a running line or process. I don't think there's room for creativity on carrying out the line's program, but there's endless opportunities for planning and improving the process off-line. People are great at deliberation, planning, and brainstorming. (Too good, some may cynically say :) I.e., you'll never get a better ROI than buying a group of operators lunch and let them rail at you about something that irritates them about a line. And include them in planning/upgrade meetings; they own the line, after all!

And there's the exception of those times where it just makes economic sense to plop a person down for something boring and lonely. For example, the cost of vision control tech is getting ever more affordable and powerful, but it still takes a substantial amount of engineering work to actually install and tune the system for the specific situation it's in; by contrast, people are cheaper in the short-run and can be reasonably effective very quickly. (It's mind boggling when you see a failure that you think, "I could have paid a guy a year's salary to sit in a chair and watch for that one obvious, uncommon failure mode event.")

[0] This is an interesting dichotomy: the workers must own the process they're working on, but they also need to not constantly fiddle with settings. If they're not actively tweaking stuff, then they feel disenfranchised, and if they are constantly messing with stuff then the operator is simulating a randomly tuned PID loop on whatever dials happen to be nearby. The root is that people are generally terrible at figuring out the difference between "normal variation" and "exceptional variation", and tune both. So when Deming talks of knowledge of variation, this has to be balanced by knowledge of psychology.

And that balancing act brings us to this article's contention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principl...

I think you might like something like TheFuck? EDIT: This bash commandline completion has been updated to by default wait for the user to verify the replacement command is what they wanted; this pretty much turns this from a terminal Russian Roulette into a kinda handy autosuggestion!

https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck

(Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9396116 )

You nailed how I feel exactly; I'm going to use "Freespace meets EvE" as my go-to description now. Because all I ever wanted was to walk around in my EvE ships and scan down wormholes.

I'll disclaim that I am strictly in the get-it-done right camp, and that none of the delays surprise me. The article's title is 83% more click-baity than the content, so it's likely worth a read if you're into Star Citizen. It basically goes over the fact that it's a huge Kickstarter project that's running late, and some people don't like that.

It's a fairly common theme we see around here, and I think Star Citizen is going to be an interesting case study in how huge croud funding campaigns finish. SC is huge - easily in the AAA game category in scope, detail, and functionality. But it also has AAA funding. But unlike a normal studio, this had to ramped up from Indie to AAA in logistics, staffing, and more. My suspicion is that we're going to see that a lot of delay came from the complexity of the screaming ramp up from small to huge.

That, and, well, I've been served well by patience in the past, and nothing I see about SC looks like it's going to be vaporware. It's certainly never going to be an 'unmitigated disaster', since the game is certainly starting to exist and is pretty gorgeous; at the least, it's going to be a mitigated disaster, which beats a couple Kickstarters for me :)

(Final disclaimer: All that said, all I have for my ship is a bit of wallpaper art; I'd really like to be able to even see my ship, but ... it's going to be a while, and I'd really like to just see it right.)

The way the little girl's phone sticks to the back seat after pulling out of her hands is just priceless.

This is cooler than I thought at first, as I thought it was a relay. The diagram at the outset really helped show what makes it special.

And there's a link to the quine-relay; did you know the QR is up to 100 languages?!