Does anyone remember that mid-2000s, 3D competitor to Flash? i think the name started with A like Ankh or something like that but I could be wildly off. It had an IDE and basically ran as a plugin in the browser. It died a quiet death.
This site kinda sorta reminds me of that.
Forget what it's called - if someone does, please post more info!
No, this was a completely different, but competing product. the IDE was intended for, to some extent, simple 3D modeling/importing of 3D models, and you could launch a browser instance to see the output.
As an aside, is there conclusive evidence to say that no aether exists, or are we just saying it doesn't exist because a handful of tests were conducted to match what we thought this aether would behave like and the tests came back negative?
Lorentz formulated his ideas in terms of a motionless aether. But his aether theory yielded predictions identical to special relativity, so later physicists ditched his interpretation in favor of Einstein's theory that didn't need an undetectable global reference frame.
Overall, we can't really have 'conclusive evidence' against any mechanism, as long as our observations might possibly be simulated on top of that mechanism. So as far as evidence goes, 'what really exists' might be higher-dimensional strings, or cellular automata, or turtles all the way down, or whatever.
Instead, physics has some number of models (either complementary or competing) that people find compelling, and mechanisms on top of those models to explain our observations. If you did come up with a modern aether theory, you'd have to come up with a mechanism on top of it to explain all the relativistic effects we've observed.
We say the "aether" as it was originally conceptualized in the 19th century doesn't exist for the same reason we say that Russell's teapot or Carl Sagan's invisible dragon in the garage doesn't exist: we have a model of the world that makes all the same predictions without it, so it gets scraped right off by Occam's Razor.
If electromagnetic radiation is propagating through some medium, then that medium is at rest with respect to all inertial reference frames simultaneously.
It's simpler not to have a medium. The field components transform a certain way under coordinate transformations, and that's all you need.
> EDIT 1/14/2025: this article went viral on hacker news and now I have a bunch of comments telling me the above is wrong; mea culpa, I was never great at physics and apparently copy-pasting the explanation from the first google hit for "how do bikes stay upright" is not trustworthy in 2025. All I really care to say is that there's something mysterious and ineffable about balancing on a bike when you're a little kid that's hard to master when you're also trying to get a grip on pedaling, and your every instinct is to brake whenever you get scared, which will immediately tip you over.
Dear OP: don't worry about HN. They are insufferable cunts and have been for as long as I've been here (well over a decade).
I just googled the same thing. Quite frankly I don't blame OP for getting it wrong, because the top result is from Cornell University.
> The accepted view: Bicycles are stable because of the gyroscopic effect of the spinning front wheel or because the front wheel "trails" behind the steering axis, or both.
If you're not already read into bicycle or motorcycle dynamics, the top google result sounds reasonable. Which makes it all the more ironic because they're talking about research which demonstrates, among other things, that it's a misconception to believe that gyroscopic forces are necessary.
It is quite confusing because there are strong points in favour of either POV.
Point: you can ride a bicycle without hands. That would be completely impossible without gyroscopic effect. Or you can push a bicycle forward without a rider.
Counter-point: kickscooters exist, with tiny little 6″ tyres which have almost no gyroscopic effect, and yet you can balance those in the same way as a bicycle.
I don't know if there is a somber write up. But from what I have heard from a lot of people, is that jobs designing and making say PCB boards and electronic circuits just don't exist. They are all in Shenzhen. Those American firms that have American engineers still, seem to all involve flying to those factories to help fix problems, and are dead end jobs. At least thats my impression.
Having known several great EEs in FAANG who did exactly that job, sometimes paying Chinese income tax due to the length of their stays at the factory, that is my impression as well.
Chip design/semiconductors/etc. have been a dead end in the US for 30+ years, but EE is a broad field and other specialties like RF/power systems/anything defense related are still in high demand. An EE with a PE will have an infinitely easier time getting a job working at a utility or engineering firm than any software developer these days to be honest.
Limited to non existent jobs. Not much else to say, the jobs like so many others have been exported. Taiwan and China being the electronics and manufacturing centers means design has steadily moved as well. Ask any board house in the west how things are going, the ones that are left that is.
It would help if they didn't charge $50 for a single raw PCB in low quantity when I can have the same board not just made, but also assembled in China for a fraction of that, shipping included. Literally.
I've often wondered if that's some kind of industry inertia issue, or if there's some underlying additional cost to build in the US.
People here cost a little more. No one here does quite the volume jlcpcb likely does. Perhaps there’s some artificial market factor as well like CCP tends to weigh some scales. There’s board assembly machines made in china as well likely further reducing the cost to build out assembly lines. Perhaps cheaper sources of basic materials like copper.
Likely multitudes of factors at play all of them in favor of China
I could buy that to some degree, but not to the current insane level of price disparity.
PCB production should be one of those things that is or can be mostly automated if it isn't already. Assembly is definitely already a mostly automated process. This is all existing tech. Thus the cost differential doesn't seem justifiable.
I have to think that this is very much "build it and they will come" territory if you can get within 1.5x to 3x the price, so it continues to boggle my mind that nobody has managed to make it happen.
The only blocker I can truly identify is the magnitude of the initial investment. That doesn't explain why the prices at domestic board houses seem to have remained pretty much exactly the same for the last couple of decades, though.
As far as I can tell, they just don't want the business.
The personnel that swaps part dispenser blades in the USA costs more. What's there to understand?
Automated assembly still has setup costs that take real humans walking around physically.
It's more likely that the Chinese companies are offering prototyping at a loss, because they know people won't switch to a different board house, once the prototyping phase is over.
This is a shrill take in the same platitudinal vein as saying there should be world peace by now. You're regurgitating techno-optimist fantasies you've read from someone else and have come to mistake them for reality or desirability.
The median individual is not going to be working less than 40 hours a week. The system has found a balancing point and people will compete with each other for the money, resources and status as much as their sanity can endure it. There is nothing anachronistic about it, because it has been the case long before 19th century and will remain the case long after 19th century.
In a world of structural demographic compression and labor shortages popping up, I'm unsure if this assertion is accurate. As labor supply contracts while demand remains constant (or increases, due to aging non prime workers who consume without producing), labor leverage to move to a 4 day week increases.
Today, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers, for example.
> It's already easy to see that submitter is optional.
Why force yourself to read inside function implementations like this for every function you might use when fool-proof automated assistance is right there? What if the function was tens of lines long? What if the optional value only appeared inside a chain of 5 nested functions? How would you easily fix/update your code if the value isn't optional now but got changed to be optional in the future?
Manual effort like this is error-prone, not scalable, and a huge distraction. Why would avoiding type annotations be worth this?
Maybe the types should have been written differently, to indicate that it's the type of the submitter property in a FormEvent. That's another cost of using TypeScript, is trying to get the types right. TMTOWTDI.
> Because this is an internal function in a _library_
Why does that matter? Error-prone approaches create buggy code and we don't want buggy code, whether it's a library or something else. Libraries can be huge and complex, and arguably should have more robust edge case checking than regular code.
This site kinda sorta reminds me of that.
Forget what it's called - if someone does, please post more info!