Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | michaelt's commentslogin

> Non-domiciled CDLs introduced, permitting foreign nationals to obtain U.S. commercial licenses

In many countries it's common to see freight being driven by foreign drivers simply because that's how cross-border deliveries are done.

If a truck of widgets is made in Poland and shipped to a store in Spain, a Polish driver will drive it the whole way.


Yeah, and they have exactly the same problem.

Video filters aren't a radical new thing. You can apply things like 'slim waist' filters in real time with nothing more than a smartphone's processor.

People in the media business have long found their media sells better if they use photoshop-or-whatever to give their subjects bigger chests, defined waists, clearer skin, fewer wrinkles, less shiny skin, more hair volume.

Traditional manual photoshop tries to be subtle about such changes - but perhaps going from edits 0.5% of people can spot to bigger edits 2% of people can spot pays off in increased sales/engagement/ad revenue from those that don't spot the edits.

And we all know every tech company is telling every department to shoehorn AI into their products anywhere they can.

If I'm a Youtube product manager and adding a mandatory makeup filter doesn't need much compute; increases engagement overall; and gets me a $50k bonus for hitting my use-more-AI goal for the year - a little thing like authenticity might not stop me.


It sounds like it was something like PLA when it was supposed to be ABS.

According to https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69297a4e345e3...

> The aircraft owner [...] understood from the vendor that it was printed from CF-ABS (carbon fibre – acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) filament material, with a glass transition temperature of 105°C [...] he was satisfied the component was fit for use in this application when it was installed.

> [...] Two samples from the air induction elbow were subjected to testing, [...] The measured glass transition temperature for the first sample was 52.8°C, and 54.0°C for the second sample.

I've known 3D printing folks who run off a throwaway prototype in a cheap, easy-to-print material to check for fit before printing in more difficult, expensive materials. Easy to imagine a careless manufacturer getting the PLA prototype mixed in with the ABS production parts, and selling it by mistake.

Of course, the aviation industry usually steers clear of careless manufactures....


That's... absurd. ABS is a terrible choice for anything in an engine bay - ABS breaks down over time when in contact with oils.

I've used PA6-CF for similar purposes in the past. Obviously not for aircraft, though.


Even in ABS I would not use something 3D printed on a consumer machine as a critical part of an airplane.

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

> The Cozy Mark IV is a 4-seat, single engine, homebuilt light aircraft [...] The aircraft is built from plans using basic raw materials. It is not a kit aircraft

You could scarcely get more DIY than this aircraft. Home-built, and not even from a kit - the builder gets to lay up every part in glass fibre themselves, by hand. And this guy had been flying it for 26 years.

It sounds like the guy was sold a part 3D printed in the wrong plastic, and it melted. He thought it was ABS, but it melted at the temperatures PLA melts at. If your engine air inlet is made of plastic that melts at 54°C (130°F) you're going to have a bad time.

It's easy to imagine how a chaotic 3D printing business might have run off a test part in a cheaper black plastic, then a confused worker could have stored the test part in with the other 'identical' parts in a different black plastic.

The 'serious' aerospace industry avoids this with lots of paperwork and procedure; when an airline maintains an airbus plane, they use only airbus-approved parts from airbus-approved sources with a paperwork trail confirming they were inspected for being-the-right-material using an approved procedure. I don't know if the home-built aircraft community would be eager to adopt those practices, though.


Before you went to college, did you have a bedroom to yourself in your parents' home?

Ridiculous comparison. First, neither I nor anyone I know had a room where we could lock our parents out. Second, your parents actually care about you and if you spent 24+ hours in there without coming out they'd check on you (probably much sooner actually). No such luck in a dorm.

It's not unusual for diagnostic criteria to hinge on the impact the thing is having on your work/family/school life.

Alcoholism, for example - we don't define alcoholism as drinking ≥2 bottles of wine a week, or say that 1 glass of wine a week is part of an alcoholism spectrum.

Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested.

How much of a problem an alcoholic is for others being roughly equal to how much of a problem alcoholism is for the alcoholic.


> Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested.

We don't ask just that, and the diagnosis doesn't hinge on those - in fact those account for only 3 (or 4 depending on how you count) of the 11 diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder. The others are about the person's own experience with alcohol, the difficulties and psychological problems caused by it to the person themself. And that's for alcohol use, an external behaviour-based problem with a specific narrow scope. Autism is a much wider construct with much more varied impact and experiences, and yet in practice people are placed somewhere on the spectrum based mainly on external interactions and troubles.

Historically this came about because people who were "low-functioning" caused more difficulties to others, whereas "high-functioning" folk didn't - even though they might have comparable amounts of difficulties and psychological anguish internally and in need of similar help too. This simplistic view is changing slowly within the field and with some therapists recognizing it better for what it is, but it's still not nearly as widely recognized as it needs to be.


Sometimes reputation and suchlike in the consumer market can directly boost your B2B business. Consumers and professionals alike will look at backblaze drive reliability figures.

Other times professionals will sneer at a consumer product, or a consumer product can diminish your brand. Nobody's wiring a data centre with Monster Cables, and nobody's buying Cisco because they were impressed by Linksys.


Not that it invalidates your point, but Cisco sold Linksys in 2013.

On "runpod community cloud" renting a 5090 costs $0.69/hour [1] and it consumes about $0.10/hour electricity, if running at full power and paying $0.20/kWh.

On Amazon, buying a 5090 costs $3000 [2]

That's a payback time of 212 days. And Runpod is one of the cheaper cloud providers; for the GPUs I compared, EC2 was twice the price for an on-demand instance.

Rental prices for GPUs are pretty darn high.

[1] https://www.runpod.io/pricing [2] https://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-Graphics-WINDFORCE-GV-N5090G...


A 5090 gaming card is a different beast to the 80gb ai cards. That one was 40k usd so for renting that to hit 1.50 dollar per hour is interesting.

Basically, it’s well known that fully laden 44 tonne articulated lorries making sharp turns do a lot of damage to roads.

That’s who in industrial estates you’ll often find concrete roads, instead of tarmac, for lorries making 90 degree turns.

American style trucks might be big, but presumably they’re nowhere near 44 tonnes.

Of course, articulated lorries only drive on major roads; your average residential road gets no lorries, so all the wear is from smaller vehicles.


44 tonnes is not that big. Sweden allows for the insane limit of 64 or 74 tonnes, depending on the road. American trucks are typically smaller than European.

> American style trucks might be big, but presumably they’re nowhere near 44 tonnes.

I believe the typical limit is 40 tons. I don't know if our tons are the same as your tonnes.


The US limit is typically 80,000 lbs, so 36.29 megagrams (aka "metric" tons).

The EU countries have limits of 40 Mg or higher (except Albania). Netherlands allows vehicles up to 50 Mg.

Of course this is all for 5+ axle vehicles. A 5-axle 40 Mg big rig is putting a 8 Mg of load on each axle (if it was perfectly distributed).

A Dodge RAM 1500 loaded up has a gross vehicle weight of about 3.27 Mg - about 1.64 Mg/axle. Fourth power law means about 566 loaded RAMs would equal one about 40 Mg 5-axle big rig in terms of road damage.


They’re close enough as to not matter a whole lot for this discussion.

When I select 'Japanese' on fonts.google.com the number of fonts drops from 1901 families down to 50. Selecting 'Hiragana and Katakana' raises the number to 81.

That's still a lot of fonts, but it's not 2000. I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.


> I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.

The ~2000 is the official count taught in schools, but the actually "commonly" used number in literature is around ~3000. And you actually want more than that, because people's names can use weird kanji which are used nowhere else.

On the other hand, the vast majority of kanji are actually composed of a limited set of "subcharacters". For example, picking a completely random one:

    徧  ⿰彳扁
The '徧' is composed of '彳' and '扁' arranged in a horizontal pattern. Unicode even has special characters (⿰,⿱,⿶, etc.) to describe these relationships.

So this actually makes creating a CJK font somewhat easier, because you can do it semi-algorithmically. You don't have to manually draw however many thousand characters there are, but you draw those "subcharacters" and then compose them together.


Has anybody ever actually implemented an algorithmically composed kanji font? Because it seems like a hugely complicated undertaking. There are rules of thumb for how characters are composed, but getting something aesthetically pleasing out of the end result is more an art than a science. Even Korean Hangul, which is way simpler, has all sorts of funky kerning rules.

Yes. Arphic, for instance, calls them radical-based fonts.

Fully algorithmically? I have no idea, as I'm not really in the fonts business.

But I'm pretty sure they're not actually redrawing every character from scratch, and are actually reusing the subcomponents (at very least for normal fonts). But how much of that is actually automated - you'd have to ask actual font designers.


Droid Sans Fallback used this strategy during Android 1.x-2.x era. Its successor Noto Sans don't do the same.

Although many kanjis can be algorithmically composed, manual adjustment of each character's shape is still necessary for production-grade fonts. For example, if you closely compare the 彳 radical between 徧, 行, and 桁, you'll notice subtle differences in width, stroke length, angle, and margin.

For 楷書 type fonts this may be true, but you ought to know there’s more to it, don’t you?

> For 楷書 type fonts this may be true, but you ought to know there’s more to it, don’t you?

With all due respect, this is the type of comment that really makes online discourse so exhausting.

Yes, I know! Unless you put up two pages of disclaimers and footnotes there's always someone who comes out of the woodwork and "um ackshually"ies you. It was only supposed to be a quick and dirty comment talking about the topic in general, and not an in-depth, ten page treatise on the subject.

If you have something to add to what I wrote, then please do so, but heckling random people who put up their comment up in good faith is not helping anyone.


I suppose you're counting the joyo kanji plus kana alphabets with diacritics. But the actual count of kanji is much higher, even if Japanese uses a relatively small number of characters for day-to-day writing.

Pretty much every native university student I met when I studied there, had passed the Kanji Kentei level 1 test. A certification of proficiency in around 6000 kanji.


2100 I took from Wikipedia:

> Japanese primary and secondary school students are required to learn 2,136 jōyō kanji as of 2010.[4] The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though this includes tens of thousands of characters only present in historical writings and never used in modern Japanese.

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


They might have passed some level of the kanken (kanji kentei) in school but it is unlikely to be level 1. The gap between level 1 and 2 is ridiculous.

Yeah nah imma call bullshit on that. Kentei 1 is notoriously difficult, only a few thousand people per year try it and the pass rate is single digits.

A typical font contains around 7,000 characters. In everyday use, you rarely touch all of them—most situations stay comfortably within the realm of jōyō kanji. However, there are many edge cases, especially with personal names, where the required characters fall outside the jōyō set. Fonts must be prepared to handle all of these possibilities, including the less common name kanji.

Out of those, only Morisawa's BIZ UD, Sandoll's IBM Plex and Adobe's Noto families are of outstanding quality.

Motoya is also a reputable foundry. FONTDASU also, I guess. And Google's Zen.

But those are all text faces! The only display families are a few freebies from Fontworks which do not cover a lot of design range.

So, yes, hardly 2000.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: