jongala

Very nice post, I think it captures and expresses things that many people in the software and design worlds have thought about a lot in the last couple of years.

I don't fully agree with it — for one thing, I think you can develop taste in a field without actively participating, but you have to engage with it beyond passive consumption. Basically: I think it's possible to be a good movie critic without making movies yourself. Given the collapse of the friction/effort side of things, I think that is really worth unpacking.

I have to say I find the debates about the post's style and em dashes pretty disheartening. There have always been plenty of good jokes to be made about HN's culture, but wow. For a community that has been snarky about fools counting lines of code for 40 years to be out here counting em dashes is pretty damning.

Relatedly, Marcin Wichary wrote a nice post about using FFT to remove moiré and halftone effects when scanning images that were printed with halftones.

It's from 2021: Moiré no More (https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/moire-no-more/).

Hilary Hahn did the same thing a few years ago. In one case, played a movement from a sonata that wasn't in the program, and in another replayed a movement from earlier. Both very interesting, and fantastic performances!

I don't know if they were the first but I think of 37signals and Basecamp as the ones that first nailed the multi-column/highlighted plan form of design that has become so dominant.

Here's 2009: https://web.archive.org/web/20090307125843/http://www.baseca...

if you go back to 2007 you can see the same structure in a plainer presentation; it's easy to see how they went from one to the other: https://web.archive.org/web/20070831191822/http://www.baseca...

Pretty interesting!

I played around with some similar ideas, it's a really interesting corner of generative art, with lots of prior work.

For mine, I make fields by superimposing a bunch of harmonic functions. By playing with different periods, phases, etc. you can get some cool patterns that look irregular and interesting, though I think they have a different feel from some of these noise-based examples.

I also make some fields by using sources and sinks: a collection of points that push out or in. You don't need that many to make an interesting field.

For collision detection I use the trick @danbruc mentioned in another comment: I draw to an offscreen canvas, and just check pixel color to see if a trace is already there. It's probably very costly in terms of memory as a data structure, but it's very convenient :) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMi4QcXn6_y/?img_index=1

For me the interest has come in coloring the lines — by deferring rendering until after the path has been plotted, you can color different traces according to how long they are, how much they curve or change, etc. which can reveal interesting bits about the flow structure. https://www.instagram.com/p/CMvqZjkHYpV/?img_index=1

Thanks for this great writeup @tehrash, the explanations and examples are great!

> Super Resolution is used in many fields like surveillance, medical industry, forensic and satellite imaging applications.

Computer, generate a list of applications where technology like this should absolutely not be used.

This seems terrifying — wouldn't this, for example, synthesize identifying details about motor vehicles not present in the sample, drawn from training data? About people? Etc etc

This sounds awesome for making a consumer mapping product feel higher quality. Hell, it could even serve an anonymizing function that is pro-privacy ("a roof" not "your roof"). But it feels incredibly reckless to direct this toward those listed industries.

People in surveillance and forensics etc. should be confronted with the limits of the quality of the data they are using, we should not try to synthesize extra confidence in their analysis by making the images seem higher quality than they are.

OK nice. A symlink will go a long way for the average user. The way I read the article it seemed like they would rely solely on the Locations list in finder sidebars.

IMO the other really big deal here is that ~/Library is a hidden folder by default. For most users Dropbox will only be exposed under the "Locations" section in finder sidebars. That feels like a huge regression to me — the whole idea of Dropbox was "a folder, that syncs." An invisible folder that syncs is much worse!

I'm not trying to talk you out of any criticisms of the OS, but just FYI: you can drag files onto app icons in cmd-tab, too. Start dragging, hit cmd-tab, and then hold cmd. The app icons hang around until you release cmd, and you can drop files on them.

I use this all the time to handle things like text, images, pdf etc to open them in non-default apps. I find this a lot easier than dealing with the dock. Hope this helps!

I agree, it feels like a missed opportunity to not explore this. I'd love to see an analysis of the swirl design (or other commonly used manufacturer patterns), with the edges rounded or beveled on the intake face, exhaust face, or both.

Like, even on cut or stamped grills, how much could performance be improved by e.g. sandblasting the finished piece from one or both sides and taking down the edges a bit?

Engadget did a story around this a while back, apparently. It has less from Okuda, but some different details and other links and examples:

https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-04-casio-and-the-sleng-teng...

This is a very interesting story, and it's great to see Okuda acknowledged for her work and hear more details about that. Casio is a great example of a company that I just took completely for granted growing up and seemed completely opaque and impersonal to me. It's so cool to see the individuals that are behind all of those things. My brothers and I had an MT-40 when we were kids, I loved playing with it, and had no idea it had an impact like this.

It will be around for a while, as noted in the comments on the article: IEEE 1394B was used in the F-22 and F-35, so unless those are retrofitted the standard will be propped up in some form for decades.

I don't understand the suggestion that cooperation and complex social systems are the province of primates. Haven't they heard of dogs, cats, pigs, deer, or the countless other animals that hunt or defend themselves cooperatively, and which have complex hierarchies in group behavior?

Yeah that's how I'm reading it but then I guess the question then becomes whether the projections were made specifically with a hedge fund strategy in mind or if they would have been the same for a more conventional investment approach.

I'm not trying to discount the take-away that the fees are very high regardless of the projection basis, but I think it's important to understand the difference. If these criticisms are not clearly reasoned or communicated, I think that fuels the perception in the financial community that these complaints are hysterical and unfounded and should be dismissed.

Can someone clarify this? Because the article explains:

> "Over the last 10 years, the return on those “public asset classes” has surpassed expectations by more than $2 billion, according to the comptroller’s analysis. But nearly all of that extra gain — about 97 percent — has been eaten up by management fees, leaving just $40 million for the retirees, it found."

Note "surpassed expectations" in there. That makes it sound not like the total return was $2B but that the return was $2B above projections, and after fees this was functionally erased leaving return at projected level. Am I misunderstanding the language here?

This is nice, a more attractive alternative to http://www.canistream.it

It would be great to be able to set buy/rent/stream filters alongside selecting providers. If you know you don't want to buy, for example, the current interface relies on a lot of clicking.

Nice work!

I love it. Ever since I saw a recreation of Fallingwater in the Half Life engine (1), I thought this would be the future of architectural design (or at least delivering design to clients). Is this becoming common now?

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqsk4WARk2I

So two very different thoughts here, and I basically agree with both: yes, there is still a place for simple, mostly analog, NA powered sports cars, and yes, it is a distortion of the system for a 918 to get some kind of green subsidy.

I was just speaking towards new paths in getting the most out of ICE-centered power systems, that an alternative power store and MGU can uncover better turbocharging options vs. a purely mechanically coupled turbine/compressor. These technologies are being developed at the less price-sensitive high end of the market, just as Tesla is doing with an all-electric drivetrain. They started at 100K+ roadsters, developed to an 80K luxury sedan, and are developing down market from there. I think it's totally appropriate to encourage a shift in industry standards, as you say, with incentives in this segment of the market (let alone where the Prius sits). It's a bit of an absurdity with the Porsche, but take heart that there are only 918 being made…

As far as what kind of sports cars we should be encouraging, even mid-market cars are so fast now you really can't enjoy them on the road. That's why cars that emphasize a fun driving experience at still-sane speeds are the most interesting to me now, like the FR-S, the Miata, the Elise, etc. But that's a separate conversation.

Yeah, exactly — once you have an electric motor/generator and an energy store, the whole game changes because you can approach the power sync problem of lag in new ways. Also, the issue of turbo size and over/under producing boost and the need for wastegates can be better managed if there is a way to capture and store exhaust energy without routing it directly to the compressor.

Some of the more sophisticated work here is also being done by Porsche in their LeMans program, which has (as I understand it) a uniquely complex turbo/hybrid setup.

I think it's really exciting. Considering this type of usage — mostly transient stuff — it's tempting to think of a system for sports cars with a supercap energy store that's lighter weight than a battery store. Toyota use supercap stores in their LeMans car, I'll be interested to see if that trickles down anywhere.

The main thing that helps me is being interested in the technology itself. The actual sport as it plays out is highly optimized/refined, as you say, but if you’re interested in what determines the performance envelope and how the different teams approach the problem of expanding it, then the whole thing takes on another dimension. The teams design and build their cars themselves with a huge range of available resources, so there is a nice mix of scrappy ingenuity, dogged refinement and luck on display.

This, together with the huge budgets involved at the front of the grid, also produces a sport that features celebrity engineers who command multi-million-dollar salaries and have dramatic contract disputes, etc. This may or may not appeal to you.

Crucially (for me), the teams are very secretive about what they are doing and why, so figuring out the mechanical and aerodynamic approaches that are in play, which ones are winning, which brilliant ideas are languishing on underfunded teams, etc. becomes a very interesting saga of nerdy armchair detective work. Even the parts of the cars that they can’t hide — the bodywork — are sophisticated enough aerodynamically that you can’t necessarily tell what is going on (or copy it for your car) without a relatively detailed understanding of how it works within an overall aerodynamic philosophy. There is a good and growing online community to get into with that.

Then you add the drivers; there are only a couple dozen to know about so its pretty accessible that way, and you get a sense as others here have said about who is under pressure, who has the talent but not the machinery and vice versa, and how they all interact.

Another interesting interaction is between drivers and cars, or driving styles and car characteristics — there are drivers that can uniquely exploit certain car characteristics, or cars that may be designed to suit certain drivers or styles, etc. and those will evolve as drivers move among teams and as the technical regulations change.

I realize typing this out that these things point more to enjoying the sport more than the races themselves. I am a lot less fixated on watching the races than I used to be, but there are still some great moments and I catch what I can. Today’s Russian GP was notably boring for the last couple of years, FWIW. For more instant gratification Moto GP might be a better bet, and most of the technical drama unfolds over there too. I still think F1 is pretty exciting though.

Most startups fail; most apps don't succeed to the hopes or expectations of their creators. Just because industry has started taking design seriously doesn't mean we should suddenly expect most startups or apps succeed. And just because Carousel, Paper, Square, Jelly, etc. are well designed, if they fail, that is not a failure of Design itself.

To the extent that the executive-level perception of design's contribution to the success of an enterprise is important, then yes, for sure: we should all make sure that the investments we make in design are substantive and focused on supporting the overall utility of what we are doing, and don't create a perception of wasted resources.

But he (to my mind) basically runs down and says that Carousel is mostly redundant in the existing photo management marketplace and hasn't had good traction; Paper is mostly redundant to Facebook's own existing app and can't find traction; and Jelly is fundamentally off target in its premise and doesn't have traction. The fact that all three had significant investments in design, and tried to showcase that investment to users, does nothing to implicate design in their failures or invalidate design's status as an essential focus for businesses.

It's a thoughtful and interesting article, but after a first reading I just don't think it holds up beyond the author's anxiety on behalf of the discipline, and/or sense of missed opportunities for talented designers to have some high profile hits.

Very interesting, thanks! I've seen some apparently decorative ink traps before but hadn't really seen fonts really built around them.

And good find on Register -- I think part of my confusion or displeasure with that face is that I was already familiar with Stratum, and in all-caps they are pretty similar (lowercase characters are pretty distinct between the two), so I thought someone had added traps to Stratum just to be different or cool. I now see that Register predates Stratum by a few years, which is interesting also.

I still prefer Stratum …

NBC used a face with insanely big ink traps in their titles for Sochi coverage. It looked like a modified version of Stratum. They looked really strange to me on screen. I'll see if I can find some samples.

EDIT: OK, check these out: http://i.imgur.com/0ovnO49.png

The problem with race-level fuel restriction is you get drivers managing their pace over the course of the race, which can lead to strategies that people find boring. Or worse, the fastest driver running out of fuel just before the end. It was one of the complaints about Group C prototype racing, although that turned out alright over all, with some help from the comparatively long race format.

The "best" system would be to use a fuel flow restriction — X g/s of fuel, with the usual restrictions on fuel composition. The designer's job is then to extract the max usable power from the chemical energy in the fuel. This would make for really exciting development and diversity, and make F1 development a true laboratory for other transportation and power production contexts.

It would also be prohibitively expensive and probably result in one manufacturer in a walkover for a while, until others could switch architectures. Experimenting with different architectures is a huge money pit, and is why the prescriptions for 10 and 8 cylinders were in the last couple sets of regulations. Just working out the competitiveness of V12 vs V10 vs V8 was getting unreasonable, let alone dealing with different hybrid setups on top of that.

It is also my understanding that the accuracy of fuel flow meters has not been considered good enough to provide adequate parity in a racing environment, when fractions of a percent can mean the difference between winning and losing.

The new F1 rules do include fuel flow metering, although it is based on kg/h and I don't know what kind of spiking is permissible. The regulations are as detailed as they are, with specifications for power transfer among components, etc. to spare teams the expense of experimenting there and to give them targets to optimize for. See jdietrich's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6952583

It is pretty discouraging with respect to the purity of the formula, but it's kind of a fact of life. And I think the development of turbocompounding and pre-spooling turbos with electrically stored energy to avoid lag is really exciting, and the future of combustion power on the road.

Looks nice. Also out there, if you didn't know, is Preceden, which I have enjoyed using.

http://www.preceden.com

Just guessing here, but the geographical advantage probably requires a fiber link, which seems prohibitive in open ocean. Putting your ship in the right place probably doesn't improve your latency if you have to bounce signals off of satellites.

At least they didn't reprint the obviously-sarcastic comments that Vettel made in interviews, which Jalopnik put in their article. As far as the tech goes, it is a total rehash of Racecar Engineering's work, but Wired has a very different audience so that isn't such a waste. I think their reasoning is flawed as to why it would be kept from Webber — the money argument doesn't smell right to me — but at least they added something to the discussion that I haven't seen fleshed out elsewhere.

Open Sans is not a Helvetica replacement / poor man's Helvetica just because it is sans-serif. It belongs along side other beautiful sans faces like Avenir, Frutiger, Myriad, and others that have their own styles and worthiness in design.

Helvetica is indeed cool (the Neue family cooler, IMO) and has been since the 50s, and _Helvetica_ is also cool. Thinking of Helvetica as the only worthwhile sans-serif typeface is less cool :)

To my (naive) eyes, your examples act as a compelling advertisement for her library.

The sed/xargs/etc. examples look increasingly like impossible-to-memorize line noise to me, while the --include, --exclude etc. options in `replace` are comprehensible and seem to follow standard command line argument practices.

Again, this is from a very entry-level unix tools perspective, but there it is.

It also seems to me that reimplementing things with the stated goal to make them easier to use has to be one of the best justifications around, no?

I hope I sound as respectful here as you did in your comment -- I certainly appreciated seeing a clear response to her library, so thanks for that.

Double thanks :)