neilpanchal

I think these are reasons why UI has regressed continually in last 10-15 years. No one speaks up. Usually casted as “UI always changes, get used to it. Grumpy people will complain for any change. See Gmail.” I can understand why Apple changes UI: it’s a luxury/fashion company that makes computers and phones.

But a professional tool needs to follow UI changes that are not justified beyond flimsy reasons? Used by millions to make a living?

The onus is on designers to justify their aesthetic/fashion instincts, to justify their tendency to churn user interfaces, the tendency to turn highly functional and dense tools into fisher price toys in the name of minimalism and infantilization users.

The central point of the article missed right over you. The critique is about the culture that surrounds: changes in UI for no real reason other than subjectivist opinions, design trends, fashion or what-others-are-doing, unoriginality, homogenization and frameworks, and the complete disregard for professional users and their infantilization.

Furthermore, changes need to be evaluated against retraining millions of people with new UI. This part seems to be missing in the calculation.

I use dozens of keyboard shortcuts in PyCharm. Most editing takes place without reaching for the mouse (vim plugin). GUI is still an integral part of Jetbrains IDEs regardless of how good you're with shortcuts. There are 10,000 things in there, with at most you can memorize and assign 100 shortcuts.

Me too, I don't think I can function without JetBrain products as an engineer. It is ridiculously powerful. PyCharm + Database tab + Debugger + Little calculator icon for impromptu interpreter + long tail of features that totally make it amazing. I don't use built in Git but I heard that's great too. The database feature has stuff like copy results of a query as INSERT statements. Mind blown.

We need to apply Chesterton's fence [1] in situations like this.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence

I interned at the GE Wind division in Greenville, South Carolina. It's under GE Energy, and it was a complete and utter disaster.

This was around 2005 and the entire GE Wind division was recently acquired from the Enron meltdown. Part of my job was to sort through a bunch of Enron manuals that had water damage sitting in the Tehachapi desert for 3 years in a warehouse. Surprisingly, the work done at Enron was quite good and bluebooks were really well done. They had already worked on a 5MW version of the turbine and had plans for 8MW. I'd say a third of it was water damaged and impossible to read. But, GE's management was a trainwreck happenning in slow motion beyond that. I worked a little bit with their Bangalore team that was working on wind turbine conceptual design framework. Essentially, GE's internal simulation tool for determining a whole bunch of design envelopes. There was little coordination between the US and Bangalore software team, often stepping on each other's toes. This program ended six months later after my internship. Basically, GE's wind turbine division at the time was Enron's zombie dressed up with nice clothes and trying to stand straight. Idk if things improved after that. I hated that internship so much, part of which was sifting through nasty boxes of molded design docs and then scanning them on a xerox machine.

Yea we used Cognex cameras to read millions of chips, trays, heat sinks, carriers, wafers, etc. Datamatrix is industrial grade. Cognex also has proprietary decoding algorithms which would detect the faintest and half damaged codes.

For those who are curious, these are 2DID Datamatrix codes, also used in the semiconductor industry extensively to mark wafers and chips. If you pick up an Intel CPU, its going to have a couple of tiny datamatrix codes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix

A friend of mine suggested this and I didn't like the idea of putting the OS on there especially that it is a virtual machine. There are a couple of things that made this setup nice though: PCIe bifurcation (4x4x4x4) lanes straight to the CPU and PCIe passthrough in ESXi. From what I read that ZFS needs direct access to the underlying hardware. So, I just treat the OS as totally disposable and not worth backing up. I can spin up a VM in less than 2 mins if something were to happen to it.

Right, what was not clear to me was that raid configuration and snapshots are also part of the file system. Usually, that's done through hardware cards or software raid where the configuration sits not on the file system (?) (Intel VROC, vSAN, etc), at least that was my wrong conceptual model. I used to make multiple copies of the USB stick of FreeNAS 8 back in the day because I didn't want the USB drive to fail and not knowing how to recover the zpool. Messing around with the file system directly cleared up everything.

Yea, TrueNAS comes with a jails manager which has nothing to do with NAS. It's incredibly feature rich: https://static.ixsystems.co/uploads/2020/04/image-4.png

Plus the setup now gets intricately coupled with the host OS. That's a big no for me. I want to treat the host OS as disposable, ephemeral and decoupled for peace of mind. The host's only job is to serve files over samba protocol and run scrub cronjobs. That's it. It gets 2 vCPUs and 24GB of ram. Stays put.

Hnggg.... this thing looks cool. A handful of .rs files in the /src folder. Sold.

I use zfs-auto-snapshot for snapshots, it works great. I think the only thing I would want is early warning for a disk failure. I'll probably automate that. TrueNAS feels extremely heavy with too many features I don't need. There is a web server, database, etc which feels overkill for a simple home NAS IMO and having to manage the management system.

I build a zfs based NAS last year[1], after 10 months of usage, I have nothing but positive things to say. One thing I didn't understand conceptually at first is that ZFS is standalone and not dependent on the host OS. This was not clear to me and it is not explained anywhere. You can wipe out the entire OS, move the drives to a new system, mount them on a new OS and run `zpool import` to import them. All the information (raid config, snapshots, etc) about ZFS is stored on the pool itself and not on the host OS, especially if you have an alias setup for invidivual drives in `/etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf`.

There is no need for FreeNAS or any of that stuff, I don't use all those features. Just run like 3 commands to create a zpool, install samba service and that's all I need from a NAS. Cron job to run a scrub every month.

If ZFS file system made a sound, it'd make a satisfying and reassuring "CLUNK!" sound.

[1] https://neil.computer/notes/zfs-raidz2/

The War by Ken Burns, a WWII documentary. My favorite documentary of all time. It is so exceptionally made.

https://imdb.com/title/tt0996994/

+1. Also, I like your username.

Essential Scalia: https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Scalia-Constitution-Courts-...

On the last few chapters about private property. Justice Scalia's jurisprudence and his views on what the role of SCOTUS ought to be is profoundly thought provoking.

Technically, the nozzle provides thrust in the hot gas path. Point taken though. In jet engines, you're correct, most of the power is robbed by the turbine. :-)

> In a turbofan, the turbine mostly rotates the various stages and creates very little thrust.

That undersells the turbine. Turbine powers not only the various compressor stages, but also the turbofan itself. All power comes from the turbine and it is is arguably the most challenging part of a jet engine. Turbine blades are tiny and fit in the palm of your hand with fingers closed [1]. Temperatures through the roof, it needs compressor bleed air to keep the turbine blades cool or the blades would melt. I was part of the team that did mechanical design of turbine blades and one of interesting challenges I remember was the trade off between the pressure-side bleed vs. trailing-edge dump techniques of cooling turbine blades. Aero engineers prefer razor thin trailing edge for better efficiency (pressure-side bleed as you can see in the picture). These are tiny holes/slots on the edge of the blade that bleed compressor air from various stages which is at 800F and trying to cool 2200F blade edge. So mechanical engineers (us) would prefer a trailing-edge-dump technique of cooling where we would make the edge thicker and drill the holes at the apex of the edge for better cooling performance. Pressure-side bleed usually won because higher fuel efficiency requirements and pushed us to do other things to cool the blade, even if that requires pulling air from a cooler compressor stage, which impacts efficiency too.

Another fun fact, the whole thing leaks hot gas like a sieve until engine reaches temperature and the tip of the turbine blades seal the hot gas path through elongation along the radial direction. Reminds me of the famous SR-71 fuel tank seals.

Jet engines are insane. So much complexity.

[1] https://www.theengineer.co.uk/media/4kgoz1mg/rr-turbine-blad...

I bitch about stuff that resonates with most HN'ers and the comments here release pent up frustrations in engineering/design. Both the writing part and the reaction on HN is a fun activity. My favorite aspect is getting emails from people and making random friends on the interwebs. So it is worth it for me. My blog here if you want to check it out: https://neil.computer/. Through HN and the blog, I've made a couple of good friends that I talk to on almost daily basis.

It brings 2k unique visitors per day according to Cloudflare analytics.

Monodraw is awesome, best $10 I've ever spent: https://berkeleygraphics.com/static/images/marketing/box-dra...

Also its fun to use wrong tools for the right job, like using an overkill $8k/seat license (Altium Designer) ECAD tool to draw diagrams. Why the hell not!?: https://neil.computer/notes/ecad-diagrams/

Similarly, I wish I could design typefaces for a living, but it is simply not realistic. It would be a dream to do it full time; ecstasy to me.

Yes.

> In terms of trading volume, it is by far the largest market in the world, followed by the credit market.

Furthermore:

> Trades between foreign exchange dealers can be very large, involving hundreds of millions of dollars. Because of the sovereignty issue when involving two currencies, Forex has little (if any) supervisory entity regulating its actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market

Thanks. We'll do ligatures, but it won't be like anything else out there.

> There is an unspoken expectation that 1 key press = 1 symbol printed on the screen. That shouldn't be violated in our view. A lot of our customers have requested ligatures, so we're working on them. But it will be anything but typical in Berkeley Mono.

https://twitter.com/berkeleygfx/status/1515047847506325508

As a ME, I used to manage a lab in a large corporation. McMasterCarr is ingrained in the US engineering culture. Every lab has a 5 inch thick yellow catalog.

Also Thorlabs. Everytime I'd open their shipment, it'd include Lab Snacks™. I wrote about it here [1]. Both are awesome companies to deal with.

[1] https://neil.computer/notes/thorlabs-lab-snacks/

For sure, humans haven’t.

This is true, visual search has a optima when the contrast of the object in the search field is above certain threshold. Below that magic threshold, it is useless (for e.g searching for a Jigsaw puzzle piece). But, when visual search works, it is probably ridiculously fast for the evolutionary reasons you rightfully mentioned.

There are a couple of things when we search for something in a text box: We're pattern matching what we think their database contains. If the hysteresis between the search and the match is small, Album grid view might work. You have to know the cover art a-priori though. But if you are vaguely looking for something, list is far better.

Yep. I wonder, if the balance has gone too far without any checks or balances? A/B testing our way into oblivion. May be, we should do a massive A/B test between 15 year old UI and today's UI. They'd probably have to modify old UIs to add some more images because visuals dominate.

I realize these things probably have commercial implications, but goddamn it feels good to rant.

Overkill guy here. You need their toolbags. Yes, you do: https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/leather-tool-bags/deluxe-...

I think Noto: https://fonts.google.com/noto