HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

davyjones

628 karma · joined October 19, 2011

http://pgxplorer.com/#buy

Two letter initials at above domain.

Feel free to get in touch apropos anything.

submissionscomments
davyjones··on Incubators are Bullshit
I have always assumed that incubator is a university setting while accelerator is an industry setting. Is this not true?
davyjones··on Two Generals' Problem
That is not a solution because "attacking" is not the stated problem. The problem is how to exchange message(s) and acknowledgement.
davyjones··on Apple CarPlay
> In 2011, 3,331 people were killed in crashes involving a distracted driver. 3,267 in 2010. [1]

That figure should be normalised to make the comparison fair. Presumably, there were more cars on the road in 2011 than in 2010.

davyjones··on Why is printing “B” dramatically slower than printing “#”?
This is the exact goal of vagrant. The toolset is already in place. I just wish more people use it while filing issues.
davyjones··on Synthetic Muscle Made of Fishing Line is 100 Times Stronger Than the Real Thing
Human muscles are capable of much...(comparable to chimpanzees?). But there is some sort of a governor in place to ensure safety. In extreme circumstances, the governor can be "turned off" (adrenalin?) and we have cases of mothers lifting cars to save her child, etc.
davyjones··on The Magic of strace
Just a few hours ago, a newly minted Ubuntu binary was crashing due a library version mismatch. I thought I had updated the shared libraries to point to the new versions. But definitely something was still hooked to the old version. I just couldn't figure out how/where. ldd wasn't of much help because everything was OK according to it. "If only I can get a bit more info when the binary is running and spit out everything before the crash."

Tried my luck with gdb. Sure enough...there was libQt5DBus pointing to the old libs leading to the crash. If you are feeling particularly adventurous, you can step one instruction at a time after starting. Even without debug symbols, there is quite a lot of info that be used while troubleshooting.

davyjones··on Poll: Do you actually use the product you are working on?
By code completion if you mean that the editor auto completes keywords and table (view, function) names, it does.

Please do write to me if you are interested. Email in profile.

davyjones··on The Adulteration of Italian Olive Oil
To quote an excerpt from that link:

" Virgin olive oil was, amongst all the oils studied, that which took longer to produce this type of compounds and produced a lower concentration of them."

I am going to assume (and hope) that that was an off-the-shelf sample, which includes the adulteration you are talking about. Unfortunately, there no further information available.

davyjones··on Poll: Do you actually use the product you are working on?
The I-would-have-liked-that lack of features in pgAdmin3 was the main driver behind my product, PGXplorer. I use it everyday to pivot, window, group tables without touching any editor.
davyjones··on The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2014
My interpretation of the graph is this:

Overall, things that rank high on SO and low on GH are more "corporate-y". Things that rank high on GH but lower than the line are "startup-y".

We have some ask HN questions like which tool I should pick-up, employable skillset, etc. Purely based on this graph, I would say pick the top-right points that lie close to the line. That should strike a decent balance.

davyjones··on How to Conquer Tensorphobia
Prologue: I just searched for the word stress on this essay and couldn't find it. So...

* * *

Let's see; for me, if I can map an abstract concept to something readily visual, my understanding is faster. Are there some close visual aids to understanding tensors?

What physical property(ies?) can be mathematically modeled as a tensor?

Imagine a stack of tiles, bottom to top, thin and piled on top of each other. And each tile is connected with its neighbours with springs (not unlike a spring-coiled bed with many layers), like so:

============== ---> Thin tile

\ \ \ \

/ / / / ---> Springs

\ \ \ \

==============

\ \ \ \

/ / / /

\ \ \ \

==============

\ \ \ \

/ / / /

\ \ \ \

==============

Now, we can pull the topmost tile along the stacked direction causing the springs to expand. If we do this and only this, it is pure tensile stress (I am referring to stress in a bit loose way here). We can also sit on that stack and that leads to compressive stress (just a tensile stress with a minus sign). [As a sidenote, bricks can take great compressive forces but can't withstand tensile forces of similar levels. But something like steel has almost symmetric response between tensile and compressive loads].

OK...what else can we do? Can I pull the topmost tile to the right (or left) while holding the bottommost tile still? Sure, and now the stack looks like a rhombus. This is shear stress...in the right-left direction. I could've also pulled the topmost tile towards (or away from) me. That is also shear stress in the front-back direction.

So, for this setup, we can identify three stress components: 1 tensile and 2 shear.

Now, the first tricky bit: imagine a "stack" that is bottom-top, left-right and front-back. There are springs running in all three directions. We have 3 tensile and 6 shear components.

Second tricky bit: shrink that new whole "stack" to a point. We have the stress tensor(!).

s = [s_11 s_12 s_13, s_21 s_22 s_23, s_31 s_32 s_33]

Tensors are used all the time in mechanics. Very very useful stuff.

davyjones··on Ask HN: How do you handle a co-founder that misses all goals?
I am not trolling. I have been looking around to team up as a co-founder. If interested and there is a match, maybe we can chug along forward.
davyjones··on Ask HN: Recommended Statistics Books/Topics for Founders?
I used this and found it a good for intro level:

Random Data: Analysis and Measurement Procedures

Bendat & Piersol

http://as.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470248777...

davyjones··on Do you need a way to manage and register domain names for customers?
gandi.net offers an API to process domain related stuff. It also offers the ability to manage domains as an authorized user while the owner is some other entity.
davyjones··on Ask HN: Where else can we use GPU processing?
Computation Fluid Dynamics, Finite Element Modeling/Analysis, Molecular dynamics, etc.
davyjones··on Ask HN: What are you listening to right now?
Tosin Abasi
davyjones··on Microsoft ‘Mortally Wounds’ SHA-1
Not a question of 'if' but 'when'. It will happen at some point though unlikely in say, 1 or 2 years from now.
davyjones··on BitNami Launches MongoDB Stack To Develop Apps
> Apache 2.4 with the Event MPM is pretty much equivalent to NGINX in terms of performance and memory footprint.

This has piqued my interest enough to look into it.

Aside, are you guys hiring remote? ;-)

davyjones··on Ask HN: How do I learn LAMP?
The LAMP guide at Linode Library gives a step-by-step procedure: https://library.linode.com/lamp-guides
davyjones··on Ask HN: What open source project is your pride and joy?
My own tool that I built to scratch my own itch. PGXplorer (pgxplorer.com). I threw in features that I couldn't find in PGAdmin3 (grouping, easy filter, windowing, pivoting). I use both these tool in tandem.
davyjones··on Looking for a co-founder
Not OP. I am guessing a service along the lines of StormDB or postgres.heroku.com.
davyjones··on MIT Wristband Could Make Air Conditioning Obsolete
I wonder how changing the perception actually impacts the body's thermostat. I would gladly sweat and let my body do its thing than have a heatstroke while being tricked into thinking that it is relatively cool outside.
davyjones··on Ask HN: I'm done with Gmail (a.k.a. NSA-Mail). What's the best alternative?
* Prepare 100 (or whatever) onetime pads using truly random events.

* Prepare a metadata sheet indicating the serial number of each of those one time pads.

* Hand both over in a face to face meeting (you keep a copy of metadata and one time pads).

* Indicate the serial number of the onetime pad used in your letter and encode the rest of your letter using that onetime pad and post the letter.

* Destroy your one time pad and your corresponding party also destroys his/her copy in an irretrievable fashion.

This all assuming nobody else gets to see the onetime pad except you both.

davyjones··on Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
> Google does everything in-house. The company gets Maps and all of its cloud services basically for free.

This statement is utterly false. In-house does not mean free.

davyjones··on Ask HN: What's your linux distro?
For anyone wanting to try out Arch, I cannot recommend enough that you install BusyBox first. A system upgrade with pacman -Syu can break your system in spectacular ways (the recent lib migration issue comes to mind).
davyjones··on Ask HN: Best online course to learn coding?
CodeLearn (codelearn.org)
davyjones··on Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years
Wait...are we in "summer" on that time-scale now?!
davyjones··on Ask HN: Graphical OSS code editor for Linux?
Code::Blocks
davyjones··on Applications open Winter 2014 Funding
I am not sure if I can pitch for a co-founder but here goes:

GitHub for CAD. With 3D printing poised to explode shortly, I am predicting a need for versioning of CAD models (along with FEM analyses). Current solutions (PLM/PDM) are very expensive and usually need to be customized. This is a business that is runs into billions of USD per annum and is ripe for disruption.

If anyone is interested, please get in touch at dj@pgxplorer.com.

davyjones··on What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate
If you are particularly fidgety and have trouble concentrating, here is a thought experiment that might help:

Sit in a room with minutes to spare and task yourself this: to get to the market and back from your house. Maybe you shop for some fruits or something.

Step into your mental realm imagining every step you have to do in this task. Changing your clothes, tying your shoe lace, locking your door...everything. Not in frames but in a continuous motion as in a movie. It could be boring and I have felt the strong need to snap out of it. It still is difficult to power through, imagining every step and "looking" at the trees and shrubs along the way, picking up and inspecting an apple and putting it in the basket, paying for the goods, etc.

The whole thing is much more difficult than it sounds if you are the kind of person who gets restless easily. With practice, it gets better. Hopefully this helps you get in the productive zone. Good luck!

← PreviousPage 3 of 8Next →