First of all, bloat has nothing to do with file size -- EPUB's are often around 2 MB, typeset PDF's are often 2-10 MB (depending on quantity of illustrations), and scanned PDF's are anywhere from 10 MB (if reduced to black and white) to 100 MB (for colors scans, like where necessary for full-color illustrations).
The idea of a 30 MB cutoff does nothing to reduce bloat, it just removes many of the most essential textbooks. :( Also it's very rare to see duplicates of 100 MB PDF's.
Second, file duplication is there, but it's not really an unwieldy problem right now. Probably the majority of titles have only a single file, many have 2-5 versions, and a tiny minority have 10+. But they're often useful variants -- different editions (2nd, 3rd, 4th) plus alternate formats like reflowable EBUB vs PDF scan. These are all genuinely useful and need to be kept.
Most of the unhelpful duplication I see tends to fall into three categories:
1) There are often 2-3 versions of the identical typeset PDF except with a different resolution for the cover page image. That one baffles me -- zero idea who uploads the extras or why. My best guess is a bot that re-uploads lower-res cover page versions? But it's usually like original 2.7 MB becoming 2.3 MB, not a big difference. Feels very unnecessary to me.
2) People (or a bot?) who seem to take EPUB's and produce PDF versions. I can understand how that could be done in a helpful spirit, but honestly the resulting PDF's are so abysmally ugly that I really think people are better off producing their own PDF's using e.g. Calibre, with their own desired paper size, font, etc. Unless there's no original EPUB/MOBI on the site, PDF conversions of them should be discouraged IMHO
3) A very small number of titles do genuinely have like 5+ seemingly identical EPUB versions. These are usually very popular bestselling books. I'm totally baffled here as to why this happens.
It does seem like it would be a nice feature to be able to leave some kind of crowdsourced comments/flags/annotations to help future downloaders figure out which version is best for them (e.g. is this PDF an original typeset, a scan, or a conversion? -- metadata from the uploader is often missing or inaccurate here). But for a site that operates on anoynmity, it seems like this would be too open to abuse/spamming. Being able to delete duplicates opens the door to accidental or malicious deleting of anything. I'd rather live with the "bloat", it's really not an impediment to anything at the moment.
This analysis doesn't demonstrate anything, unfortunately, except that ratings declined over time and that writers changed over time.
Any factor could have caused the show's decline (like less time given for script writing, less collaboration or rewrites, management directives to change aspects of the show, etc.) -- and it would show the same result.
This is just silly. News flash: software UX isn't perfect, and it never will be.
When you have a phone that can do 10,000 different things limited to a screen a few inches wide, of course it's going to be harder to do some things than others. And there will be some inconsistencies and some annoyances.
It's not like any other phone is obviously way better. Yes there are plenty of UX things that could be improved... but "iPhones are hard to use" is a clickbait title, and the content is just a totally random laundry list of one person's annoyances. Doesn't really seem like HN material.
This article and most of the comments just scream "I don't like new/different things!" or "I don't know how to do x therefore it's a terrible implementation"
I dunno... I find that on most sites which implement infinite scroll, I like it.
Reddit lets me browse stuff without interruption, and it's not like I'm ever going to "go back" to somewhere earlier in the list... which has probably changed in the past 10 minutes anyways.
Shopping sites let me browse hundreds of shoes or shirts without interruption, and again it's not like I'm ever going to bookmark a segment of my search result. Same with Google Images.
It's easy enough to put footer content in the header, or in the About page or something. (How often do you use a footer anyways?)
And if you really need to start somewhere in the middle... usually filtering/sorting is a better approach anyways. E.g. for a blog, it's better to have a link to Jan 2015 articles than have a link to page 9 of posts.
I find myself mildly annoyed when I have to click through to the next page of something.
Obviously there are plenty of sites where it doesn't make sense... but I don't see it there too often since it's usually more work to program. This feels like a non-issue.
And for example, here on HN when there are too many comments it requires me to click "More" to get to page 2. Why not just auto-load them when I reach the bottom instead? If I got that far, it's more likely than not that I want to read more.
Which ones? Standard reddit uses prev/next, not infinite scroll, and all the shopping sites I'm familiar with use prev/next as well, rather than infinite scroll.
Yeah, reddit does infinite scroll. I'm using the mobile web version and it's awesome that way. Prev/next is annoying for binge content consumption or navigating through comments...
If you're treating that as their primary function, you're just throwing away money, tons of money.
If you decide you want to work out and eat right, take responsibility for it and truly make the personal choice. Or buy a couple of self-help books to learn some techniques. E.g. The Power of Habit. It'll be orders of magnitude cheaper.
This argument is a bit self defeating. You can easily replace the information a personal trainer gives with a standard training program and YouTube videos that show proper exercise form. You cannot easily replace its willpower function with a book.
I was always taught there are 12 notes, while any standard scale contains only 7 of them. (The chromatic scale obviously being the exception which contains all 12.)
Accidentals are just for notation -- obviously B-flat and A-sharp are the same "note", just as F-sharp-sharp and G are.
Our entire turning of equal temperament is based on 12 equal intervals, not 7. So I'd argue parent commenter is correct -- notes are base 12, not base 7.
Scales are based on ratios, and our equal tempered scale is a compromise to get equidistant steps that can be used to closely approximate those ratios. The idea being to be able to use the same instrument to play in any key without retuning the instrument and adjusting the intonation.
So...one could argue for either or both interpretation and explanation. The note names, sharps and flats, is what is most arbitrary about it.
I think a lot of the frustration isn't from tipping... it's from tip creep.
To many people, tipping feels like an unfair relic of the past that can be associated with negatives like racism (servers of color receiving less), pay disparity (why do underpaid servers get to benefit from tips but not underpaid line cooks), etc.
At least here in NYC there's been a growing movement of "tip included" restaurants and coffee shops, which feels like social progress.
But when my bakery added a prominent tip jar (not even a cafe!), when Uber added a reminder about tipping after each ride -- it can feel like society moving backwards.
Sorryt that's what I meant, yes. The tip is in the price already. E.g. my coffee shop has $4 coffees when surrounding ones are $3. But no tip jar or tip buttons on the terminal.
How would the composition of a planet affect how much light it blocked of its star when passing in front? And signal to noise ratios are presumably quite easy to simulate. So not really sure what's so hard about it.
Composition determines density. A rocky planet would block less light than a gas giant planet of the same mass, because it would be denser and therefore smaller.
But does density have to do with anything Kepler measures?
Since it only measures how much light decreases, I assumed it's only measuring planet size, and that we're totally ignorant about planet mass and density?
> The free piston is magnetically coupled to the passenger modules above; this arrangement allows the power tube to be closed, avoiding leakage. The transportation unit operates above the power tube on a pair of parallel steel rails. The company currently has a 1/6 scale pilot model operating on an outdoor test guideway... The Corporation claims that a full-scale implementation would be capable of speeds in excess of 200 mph (322 km/h).
It sounds like magnetic coupling is the solution to the maintenance issues.
But it also seems like you can only have one train on a track at any given time.
Or, at least a track would have to be divided into sections, each with its own pumps and own piston, which could only support one train at a time... and then the piston would have to be sent backwards to the beginning of the section to be ready for the next train. (And you'd need electromagnets to let go of one piston and grab the one on the next section.)
So I can see why this might not be viable for something like a city's subway system.
But at the end of the day... what advantages would this ever have over electric trains that get their power from a third rail?
If desired, you could solve this by having a piston that can open up. Stick a butterfly valve[1] in the middle of it.
It might even be a significant advantage! A limiting factor of railway throughput is minimum headway[2]. You can't have trains crashing into each other, and trains are bad at stopping, so you need lots and lots of space between them. But if two trains are on the same tube together, they are naturally going to maintain a fixed distance between them.
Unfortunately, it's a bit tricky to take advantage of that because when they're close together, if you stop one, you have to stop them all. Also they all have to travel at the same speed, which is annoying if one needs to slow down for a turn.
> Fully loaded vehicles have a ratio of payload to dead-weight of about 1:1, which is up to three times better than conventional alternatives
Might make sense for a small system.
But electric machines have made huge advances in the last decades. Frequency converters, DC-DC converters, high torque permanent magnet motors etc are now very commonplace.
For example in the workshop, electric tools have supplanted pressurized air ones.
The advantage is the direct transfer of mechanical power.
This is why many elevators today still use cables rather than putting a giant electric motor inside the elevator.
The only real advantage I could see over a cable car is that the piston might be much efficient over long distances or winding tracks. Kinematic bending and stretching of a cable will produce heat which will cause a reduction in efficiency whereas slow changes in pressure tend to be isothermal.
"One apparent advantage of the cable car is its relative energy efficiency. This is due to the economy of centrally located power stations, and the ability of descending cars to transfer energy to ascending cars. However, this advantage is totally negated by the relatively large energy consumption required to simply move the cable over and under the numerous guide rollers and around the many sheaves. Approximately 95% of the tractive effort in the San Francisco system is expended in simply moving the four cables at 9.5 miles per hour" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_car_(railway)
> The food web appears to have been obliterated from the bottom. It’s credible that the authors link the cascade to arthropod loss, Schowalter said, because “you have all these different taxa showing the same trends — the insectivorous birds, frogs and lizards — but you don’t see those among seed-feeding birds.”
> Lister and Garcia attribute this crash to climate. In the same 40-year period as the arthropod crash, the average high temperature in the rain forest increased by 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures in the tropics stick to a narrow band. The invertebrates that live there, likewise, are adapted to these temperatures and fare poorly outside them; bugs cannot regulate their internal heat.
Seed-eating birds spend a lot of time gathering insects to feed their young. I presume also seed plants are dependent on pollinators. Certainly this is just an armchair comment but I would have expected the effect to show up across the board.
The reason it isn't is that this study is based in Puerto Rico, where the bugs don't have the option of migrating north. In the US mainland, yes, this is happening, and it's harming insects, but the main result is migration, not extinction.
First of all, bloat has nothing to do with file size -- EPUB's are often around 2 MB, typeset PDF's are often 2-10 MB (depending on quantity of illustrations), and scanned PDF's are anywhere from 10 MB (if reduced to black and white) to 100 MB (for colors scans, like where necessary for full-color illustrations).
The idea of a 30 MB cutoff does nothing to reduce bloat, it just removes many of the most essential textbooks. :( Also it's very rare to see duplicates of 100 MB PDF's.
Second, file duplication is there, but it's not really an unwieldy problem right now. Probably the majority of titles have only a single file, many have 2-5 versions, and a tiny minority have 10+. But they're often useful variants -- different editions (2nd, 3rd, 4th) plus alternate formats like reflowable EBUB vs PDF scan. These are all genuinely useful and need to be kept.
Most of the unhelpful duplication I see tends to fall into three categories:
1) There are often 2-3 versions of the identical typeset PDF except with a different resolution for the cover page image. That one baffles me -- zero idea who uploads the extras or why. My best guess is a bot that re-uploads lower-res cover page versions? But it's usually like original 2.7 MB becoming 2.3 MB, not a big difference. Feels very unnecessary to me.
2) People (or a bot?) who seem to take EPUB's and produce PDF versions. I can understand how that could be done in a helpful spirit, but honestly the resulting PDF's are so abysmally ugly that I really think people are better off producing their own PDF's using e.g. Calibre, with their own desired paper size, font, etc. Unless there's no original EPUB/MOBI on the site, PDF conversions of them should be discouraged IMHO
3) A very small number of titles do genuinely have like 5+ seemingly identical EPUB versions. These are usually very popular bestselling books. I'm totally baffled here as to why this happens.
It does seem like it would be a nice feature to be able to leave some kind of crowdsourced comments/flags/annotations to help future downloaders figure out which version is best for them (e.g. is this PDF an original typeset, a scan, or a conversion? -- metadata from the uploader is often missing or inaccurate here). But for a site that operates on anoynmity, it seems like this would be too open to abuse/spamming. Being able to delete duplicates opens the door to accidental or malicious deleting of anything. I'd rather live with the "bloat", it's really not an impediment to anything at the moment.