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The 0th law of UX: Any website that attempts to describe good UX will itself be criticized for bad UX.

Ha, well done. I really enjoyed Ash Kyd's site.

https://ash.ms/

Can you even buy half the ram for that cost?

> 1.5 TB DDR4 ECC Ram

The virus doesn’t make this distinction. You lose both.

Oh man, I am using (abusing?) AHK so hard. I work with legacy software programs for structural analysis, where everything in the model has to be input with clunky form fields. Thousands of properties need to be defined for various structural components (beams, columns, etc). It used to be >2 weeks of entering numbers into fields and clicking buttons.

Now, AHK is set up to just reads my design spreadsheets and define everything in a few minutes. I hate the language syntax, but man is it useful! God bless AHK!

I can make multiple instances to run multiple simulations in parallel, but matrix factorisation within the program itself is single-threaded. The stiffness matrix of these structures needs to be reformulated frequently (every time a structural element yields / gets damaged), so this is the largest time-sink, I think.

I'm not disagreeing with you... Its horrible but that is the industry standard.

Honestly my biggest problem right now is that I don't even know if there's anything I can buy/upgrade to speed it up. I don't know how to determine what the bottleneck is, so to speak.

I’m a structural engineer, running nonlinear analyses of buildings. These take about 3-5 days to run on an i9-9900k. The program runs each earthquake simulation on a single core.

Maybe instead of full-fledged journal model, negative results should be published in a short (few pages) failure report. This addresses at least a few of the points you highlight. Skip all the cruft: here’s what we tried to do, here’s our methodology, and here’s the result.

Then these could be classified by methodology/process/chemicals/etc for people to look up before starting their research.

That was my feeling as well - it’s not necessarily complicated, it’s just so niche as to not have anyone making it. Today I found this GitHub repo which I may try tinkering with on the weekend:

https://github.com/highkite/pdfAnnotate

I didn’t clarify that the tool needs to store the information so it can be imported into CAD, rather than just being hand scribbled lines and numbers.

(Except when you press too enthusiastically and miss the trash can completely)

I work in an industry that marks up PDFs extensively (construction) and have wanted to build a bespoke PDF markup tool for a long time. In designing concrete floor slabs, we need to transfer information from our FEA software to a dwg. Currently a blank plan is printed, it’s marked up by hand, and then handed to a drafter to put back into the computer. It’s a very inefficient process. But all the SDKs are stupidly expensive (this one included). It’s really surprising there isn’t something open source, given the importance of PDF markup in many industries and businesses.

Very common in structural engineering, and I imagine that’s about it. Concrete is heavy.

In this case, the result seemed odd, so I checked it by stepping away from the spreadsheets and FEM software, and simplifying the problem down to a quick hand calc. But if I hadn’t done this exact exercise on dozens of buildings, I might not know what ‘odd’ looks like.

Luckily, in this field, you can usually come up with a quick check that gets you within +/- 20% of the more sophisticated answer. These kind of sanity checks should be baked into the design process, but unfortunately not everyone seems to do them.

I’m terrified of making one of these ‘big picture’ mistakes. I’ve long been weary of the fact that there is a surprising amount of engineering going on without scrutiny or peer review. And over reliance on computer modelling and increasing complexity makes it less and less easy to grasp the big picture.

Just yesterday I made a trivial error crunching some numbers for when a construction site could turn off their dewatering. Quite the opposite of this submarine, my structure would be 1000s of kips too buoyant and could potentially float up out of its excavation due to hydrostatic forces. A mistake like going unnoticed could easily be a career-ender.

(I don't smoke btw, but my father-in-law smokes like a chimney)

Its hard to relate cause and effects, but I see a noticeable decline in smoking among younger people, and smoking has become very uncool. People will also make a big deal about second hand smoke, for instance if you're near a bus stop or busy sidewalk you may get called out.

I don't know if anything besides medical intervention can stop a seasoned veteran smoker, though. Packaging certainly hasn't had any effect on my few family members that smoke.

Canadian packages too. They required a rather graphic health warning over 50% of the surface area (showing a smokers lungs with explanation, etc) and also removed branding. So it’s a giant health warning over the top half, and then a plain brown lower half with the name/type

I think it was in the beginning, and its certainly easier to set up for Chinese citizens. The big hurdle is you needed a Chinese bank account. Alipay now has a Tourpass which is specifically made for foreigners.

Thanks but this sounds... above my level of computer competence

I’m really surprised that the major credit card companies are not jumping into the mobile payment arena(similar to WeChat and Alipay). I think this is the future of consumer transactions.

I spent three months in China, and had 1 opportunity to use my credit card: booking a flight home. Everywhere else, I was out of luck. That forced me to use WeChat wallet and Alipay, and I got to say that the experience was really good. There’s so little friction to spending money and can be used for basically everything in China.

It must be way lower fees for everyone involved as well. I only need to do a single bank transaction for the month(loading my wallet) and then after that it’s just swapping credits. Perhaps that’s why cc companies are reluctant.

I don’t think there’s compression or encryption. I can search and find the hex representation of text and values that I expect to be there. I guess I need to bite the bullet and spend some time tagging the parameters I know, then figuring out the pattern of padding that is in between.

Ok thanks, I'll take a look. It's possible for me to generate these files for each of the various material settings so I can manually 'diff' them, simillar to what you're describing

thanks but sadly not, its from a structural analysis program called PERFORM-3D.

I've contacted the developer but they will not release the format of the files to me.

A slightly related question for HNers: Is there any easy tool for a non-cs guy to reverse engineer a binary file containing numbers and text in some specific format?

I have to work with some old structural analysis software. The material and element definitions come in an obscure file format ".PF3CMP". I know it contains text like the material names, and numbers/letters for the material properties.

Ultimately its my goal to be able to write these files from matlab or python, instead of using the horribly clunky user interface. But first I need to know the structure of the file, and I'm not even sure how to begin figuring that out.

[0] is what it looks like when opened in a hex editor

[0] https://imgur.com/a/jvqV3k8

Having driven through northern BC quite a bit, there’s been dozens of times where a rockslide / logging truck rollover / construction has caused a detour off the highway and down some remote roads. Not saying that’s what happened to them, but rather that it’s best to be prepared because you never know what will happen.

This is consistent with my observations in the Jiading area - low pollution days but mask usage around 80% for general populace and 95% for service workers (store clerks, etc).

We’ve decided to leave China before things get any worse. I’m not looking forward to bringing my family through the airport this week though...

> It would be better to stop public funding of police all together and replace it with either private security contractors hired on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, or citizen's patrols like the Guardian Angels, Black Panthers, or a version of Neighborhood Watch.

This is a bad take, in my opinion. For the most part, all types of crime have been steadily declining since the 1990's [0][1][2]. You can't say policing is ineffective as a whole. There are certainly things to be improved upon, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in_t...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Violent_crime_rates_by_ge...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burglaries_per_1,000_pop....

If you follow the professional liability model used in other fields of engineering (civil, etc), the buck stops at whoever sealed the report / letter of assurance / drawings / etc). We usually call them the Engineer of Record (EOR) in my field, and they are usually someone at the top.

I'm not advocating for that model in software, but it does provide a very transparent way of determining who is responsible. As the EOR, you may not design every member or do every calculation, but ultimately it's your ass on the line. I suspect it also changes your behavior when you know you are the one taking responsibility.

This is pretty cool. We use some awful enterprise software for timesheets (Deltek) and its frustrating enough that I only enter information once per week. During the week I use my outlook calendar, creating events corresponding to projects and hours worked.

A nice feature would be to export the Timelite log into an ical file or directly into calendar.