Hacker News Reader

gnaffleon Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?

Agreed. There is a real problem that Stack Overflow comes out on top if you Google for most of the "best X framework/library/... for Y" questions.

Thus, many if not most of my encounters with SO are with closed, marked-as-offtopic questions that are still often the best resource to get an overview of the available alternatives.

I would love for someone to sift through the SO dataset for such questions and create a new, separate community catering to this specific need.

gnaffleon The Heartbleed Bug

ABS pointless? The Wikipedia article disagrees, so I'd certainly like to know more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system#Effect...

ESC is certainly shown to be effective, although I don't know about traction control: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#Ef...

gnaffleon “The Mill” – It just might Work

That's not really how the story goes, though. Intel spent a lot of effort on getting Itanium to succeed, and they really dragged their feet into x86-64. It was the market that decided that the price/performance of Itanium wasn't worth it.

gnaffleon Minecraft creator says he’s canceled talks for Oculus Rift version

> What company isn't creepy these days?

Apple? Valve? Pretty much any company where their primary way of making money isn't dependent on collecting and feeding off their users data.

gnaffleon Facebook acquires Oculus VR

Yeah, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are not idiots either, but the history is littered with great products that were killed off after they were bought by Google. It's entirely reasonable to be at least skeptical about this.

gnaffleon MicIO – HTML5 to MicroController Communication through a headphone jack

Nice!

BTW, with the new Bluetooth Low Energy protocol, you don't need a $100K license to interface with iOS devices anymore: http://www.mkroll.mobi/?page_id=386

gnaffleon NwAvGuy: The Audio Genius Who Vanished

The recording might capture a lot more detail than what the sound engineer was hearing. For instance, the recording could have been made in the 60s or 70s, and the state of the art in sound reproduction can have improved since then. So unless you want to argue that hearing that extra detail that the mix engineer didn't hear is "wrong", I don't see how you can make your point.

If someone records a live concert using a pair of high quality mics and a pair of crap headphones, is the "truest" reproduction of that recording made with the crap headphones, or is the "truest" reproduction what sounds closest to being present at the concert?

gnaffleon Pending Comments

What I'm really tired of is that off-topic, nitpicking discussion threads are often on top. I have to wade through a lot of comments to find the good ones. And I say that as someone who has myself fallen to the "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome.

What I would like would be to have a tagging system on comment threads, so that I could filter out comment threads with rough edges if I didn't like them, or threads with endless back and forth nitpicking, or threads that have been covered endlessly before. Something like the old slashdot "Informative" or "Funny" system. Then the ones that wanted could troll and flame away to their hearts content, without disrupting the general discussion of a topic. The "no censorship" crows could turn off filtering alltogether and get HN exactly as it is today.

gnaffleon Fluke owns trademark on multimeters with "contrasting yellow border"

Maybe he has an order in for 2000 units? In any case, they should have ordered them in Sparkfun Red while they were at it.

gnaffleon Fluke owns trademark on multimeters with "contrasting yellow border"

Where would you find someone to unpack, paint and repack them for less than $15 a piece?

gnaffleon Fluke owns trademark on multimeters with "contrasting yellow border"

The original Fluke 87 was introduced in the mid 90s if I remember correctly, and I think the yellow cases predate that model.

gnaffleon Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

Thanks! That's a good summary post.

gnaffleon MH370: A different point of view

If so, they would probably already have seen other faults as well, and at the very least have a warning about the transponder being disabled. Their last communication made no mention of any problems.

gnaffleon Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

From what I understand, the traces they are correlating now come from military radar (which is also why they have not been made public).

gnaffleon Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

Anything is possible, but my guess is that if they were hijacked, they had a plan that went wrong. It's far more likely, and it's happened before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_961

gnaffleon Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

From what I read elsewhere, synchronization problems between different radar systems and other effects can also cause echoes or "ghosting" to appear, so it's not uncommon to see more than one trace for a particular object. Depending on the sophistication of the radar system, these traces could be ignored either by software or by operators.

When they say they put national security second to investigating the flight, what they're saying is that they're now exposing a lot of information about these radar systems with other countries in order to figure out what happened.

gnaffleon Expert Was Needed to Disable Malaysia Airlines Jet Systems

Avionics software is written in an environment where, _if_ such a problem as a programming language being "old and unfriendly" introduced bugs, that would have been noticed and mitigated.

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

gnaffleon Tokyo Radiation Less Than Paris’s Three Years After Meltdown

I think the biggest issue with nuclear energy is public trust. It was broken with Chernobyl, and broken again with Fukushima. I've always been pro-nuclear, and have spent a lot of time arguing why it's better than many of the alternatives, especially coal. But people just don't trust it anymore. It may not be a problem in China, but in democratic countries it's a big problem.

One of the things I and many pro-nuclear people claimed was that todays reactors were designed with so many safeguards and precautions and what-ifs that the risk of a large scale disaster was so slim that it could pretty much be discounted. Chernobyl was an understandable one-off.

And people believed this story. The public's perception of nuclear energy was just about recovered when Fukushima happened.

Fukushima exposed real problems with TEPCO and their planning that went undiscovered by Japans nuclear agency or the IAEA. You would think that they would have planned for this worst case scenario, but they didn't (they did not expect a tsunami to knock out the generators). So how can we expect people to feel safe about other nuclear plants? We can again try to explain all the safeguards, but they will remain unconvinced because the trust is again lost.

Like if you tell an airline passenger that it's extremely unlikely for turbulence to cause damage to the aircraft and then half a wing breaks off, they're not going to trust you again no matter what you say, even though what you said was true.

So now we will have to wait even more years to gain the trust back by having a perfect safety record. Except for the next 20 years or so we will have gradual news to remind us about Fukushima as they bit by bit disassemble the plant and learn more about what exactly happened in the reactors.

gnaffleon Tokyo Radiation Less Than Paris’s Three Years After Meltdown

100% renewable energy for electricity production is certainly feasible, despite what some people say.

Some countries like Denmark already get 44% of their electricity from wind and biomass (other countries get more, but those are exceptions with hydroelectric plants).

gnaffleon Tokyo Radiation Less Than Paris’s Three Years After Meltdown

I don't believe anything in particular, that was just one of many potential explanations.

That said, I'm not alarmed by the radiation in Japan, I'm more alarmed about the situation of the Fukushima plant and the problems they face with potential leakage into the groundwater (among other things).

gnaffleon Tokyo Radiation Less Than Paris’s Three Years After Meltdown

I was just pointing out a flaw in his reasoning. I didn't argue that it exists (and from what I gather from other comments, it doesn't). But if it did, it could be offset by any number of things, some of which might not be shared to the same extent with other cities.

Or it might be that the baseline background radiation is so small that 2x that baseline is still statistically insignificant compared to other factors.

gnaffleon Tokyo Radiation Less Than Paris’s Three Years After Meltdown

Maybe because the background radiation is just one of many, many contributing causes of cancer?

For instance, airline pilots are exposed to more radiation than the average worker. But they also have a low percentage of smokers, and in order to keep their medical license they need to be in fairly good health. So, apart from skin cancer, they have lower than average rates of cancer compared to the general population:

https://www.alpa.org/portals/alpa/magazine/2001/March2001_He...

gnaffleon Model aircraft operators free to operate commercially in US, rules federal judge

It's all about how widespread they are. What was before a pretty limited hobby where most people would know about and be mindful of light aircraft (and sometimes share airstrips with them), might turn into a real problem when prices come down and anyone can operate them without much training, as modern drones can with gyro and GPS stabilization.

gnaffleon Model aircraft operators free to operate commercially in US, rules federal judge

I'm pretty sure that as UAVs increase in capabilities and come down in price, there will be regulations that force them to carry alerting / avoidance systems (like FLARM or similar) and light aircraft will have to carry them, too.

Just like in many countries, restrictions on the sale of high power laser pointers are in effect and vastly limit the amount of people that have easy access to them, and therefore the risk of someone doing something stupid.

gnaffleon Apple CarPlay

That's interesting. Not sure if it's a "jurisdiction" thing, as in if it's a part of the airplane, they go into the certification regime?

For instance, laptop PCs running Windows and iPads are certified for EFB use now (I would assume for approach plates as well), but I'm not sure what the limitations are, or what certification level that is.

Btw, what did you work on in avionics, and what made you move to a different area of work?

gnaffleon Apple CarPlay

http://ipocars.com/imgs/a/b/n/u/s/citroen__citron_citron_ber...

Here's an example of a car from ca. 2005 that has simple, manual controls for climate control. If the passenger is too warm, there's a separate button for opening the window :)

Some newer cars also have separate dials for heat on each side: http://static.autoexpress.co.uk/sites/autoexpressuk/files/st... ..but of course they still have pushbuttons for fan speed.

gnaffleon Apple CarPlay

Well, if you look at Airplay, they had a technology that worked well for _years_ until the "leading standard" caught up. They do support other standards such as A2DP though.

gnaffleon Apple CarPlay

Granted, the things that touchscreens replace in avionics are the stuff that you need your eyes on to operate in any case (navigation computer etc). And they often replace input systems that were far, far worse (read http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/garmin-gps for a funny review of the old Garmin avionics).

And in the air, you have a little more time to look at the instruments without risking crashing into a meeting car or driving off the road. I suspect (hope) that the current trend with touchscreens in cars will be a fad, and that manufacturers will realize that some features (climate control etc) are best implemented with traditional controls.

It's sad when my 10 year old car has a UI on that part that allows me to use it without taking the eyes off the road.

gnaffleon The Job After Steve Jobs: Tim Cook and Apple

Exactly. They kept an x86 version of OSX for many years until 2005 when they did the switch, so I would expect them to have several prototypes of hybrid OSX / iOS devices like the Surface that they are playing around with while looking to find the right formula, not to mention integrated Apple TVs og Apple TVs with beefier graphics cards.

gnaffleon The Job After Steve Jobs: Tim Cook and Apple

Well, that's my point (although you could say Xbox was an exception). Tim Cook is very well known quantity when it comes to execution, just like Jony Ive is when it comes to product design, but for innovation, we don't know how the team stacks up.