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My partner is doing a distance learning bachelors from the Open University in the UK. They have both part time and full time tracks. The part time takes 6 years to complete. It's interesting too because the university has been doing distance learning for a long time, so it's not a standard online class. I believe the cost for the whole degree is around 32k USD.

Also, I suspect that if you plan to continue working in software, since you have experience, you maybe shouldn't worry too much about a degree from outside the US. I bet many recruiters just view a degree as a checkmark and are more interested in your work experience.


I'm just waiting for flywheel powered buses to make a return: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus


Wow I had no idea this existed

>Disadvantages

>Weight: a bus which can carry 20 persons and has a range of 2 km (1.2 mi) requires a flywheel weighing about 3 tons.

>The flywheel, which turns at 3000 revolutions per minute, requires special attachment and security—because the external speed of the disk is 900 km/h (560 mph).

It's truly a mystery why they never caught on


You missed the last and most funny one

>Driving a gyrobus has the added complexity that the flywheel acts as a gyroscope that will resist changes in orientation, for example when a bus tilts while making a turn, assuming that the flywheel has a horizontal rotation axis.

So you have a giant blender than can travel one mile in a straight line before needing to be recharged


There once was a train that made clever use of that effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyro_monorail


Shouldn't it still be able to turn, just not tilt?


It depends what orientation you mount the gyroscope in, but yeah the "correct" way would be to make it axis vertical to limit pitch and roll


Cool :) but reminds me that all energy storage is scary and an accident waiting to happen.

Flows > stocks, overhead wire for the win!


I personally think Battery buses with SAE J3105 'docking' points at key stops (basically, the stops that are used to loiter to set timing, rather than leaving as soon as possible) is a better solution than the cost of stringing OHL through every major road in a city.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_electric_bus#Chargin...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J3105


Reading about this and matching it up with what I see in some more recent electric truck and ferry charging videos I feel this is almost historic tech.

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


Think that’s bad? Look at this thing! https://www.en-former.com/en/mammoth-flywheel-for-irelands-g...

4GJ of stored energy, dischargeable in eight seconds.



I'm currently reading "The Windup Girl" set in a mostly-post-fossil-fuel future, where most energy storage is springs.


I agree that buyers should have the option to purchase simpler cars. But I think backup cameras are too valuable of a safety improvement to leave out. About a year ago I saw a toddler very likely saved by the backup camera and proximity sensor. This is of course just anecdotal, but it sold me.


Wouldn't the proximity sensor be enough? Sounds cheaper and much less prone to unwanted surveillance.


Yeah, I guess then you don't need a screen for display. And to be honest the proximity sensor may have had the greater effect in the situation I referenced. I could hear it beeping from where I was about 30 feet from the car.


My reading of the comment was that the German language is used enough that it would make sense to invest the time to learn. But that languages from smaller countries are less relevant outside of the given county.


For anyone wanting to do this calculation yourself, this site is really good: https://www.aa.quae.nl/en/reken/zonpositie.html

I've previously used the formulas on this site to calculate the altitude/azimuth of the Sun and all the planets from a given lat/long/time on Earth.


My method for applying fitted sheets is to put the first corner of the sheet that I find onto any corner of the bed. Then try to add one of the adjacent corners to the bed. If I picked wrong, put the adjacent corner on the starting bed corner. I get it wrong half of the time, but I still think it's faster than spending time trying to determine which is the long side of the sheet (and often getting that wrong). In any case, the labels mentioned in the article would probably be better.


On a king bed that’s more difficult because the dimensions are close enough to be within tolerances for most sheets, but with a big enough gap that when you get to the last corner it will be right.

The last two sets of sheets I’ve had have a tag in one corner which I use to orient them. I’m not actually sure if I’ve chosen the right corner, but I know they fit that way.

The issue I’ve run into since getting a foam mattress is they are at least 50% thicker than spring mattresses and the flat sheet cannot be tucked into both sides at the same time. Expensive sheets by hipster companies, cheap overstock sheets from TJ Max and great hotel style sheets all have failed to make it across the bed with one side tucked in.


The world would be a better place if king size beds were square.


Ah yeah, I can see that would be a problem. The part I dislike is trying tell which side is correct and frequently getting it wrong. Which I can see would happen with a king bed. When you get to the second corner you have to discern whether the side between the corners is too tight or just right.


YMMV but as far as I can tell, the tag on a sheet is always at the (imagine you’re standing at the foot of the bed looking at the bed) bottom right corner. (Or top left, obviously.) It seems to be pretty standard on all my sheets.

bonus tag tip: the care label on pretty much every shirt I’ve ever seen is located always on the left seam of the torso area. Very useful as an additional orienting tool when dressing a kid, that tag should be on your right when you’re facing them.


My wife has had to listen to me complain for the last week about what a pain it is to get the absolute orientation of an iPhone from the browser.

On Android you can use AbsoluteOrientationSensor or deviceorientationabsolute event. These will provide a quaternion or Euler angles describing how to rotate the device from the default orientation (flat on the ground, screen up, with the top pointing north) to its current orientation.

The situation on the iPhone has almost reduced me to tears. As far as I can tell, it only provides Euler angles relative to some implementation defined reference frame, along with the actual compass heading. In practice, the Euler angles given are absolute with respect to gravity, but always treat north as the direction the phone was pointed when the first sensor reading took place. To deal with this, you can use the actual compass heading to rotate the relative orientation to the absolute orientation. But this will have problems near the poles, as the Euler angles and heading will give conflicting values. Beyond this the compass heading field is really weird. If you want to experience its behavior for yourself, take the iPhone compass app and starting from flat, rotate the phone 360 degrees through the pitch axis. Notice at what points the heading flips between its start heading and start heading+180. I bet it will surprise you!


To me it sounds like the solution is "We have detected you're using an unsupported browser, iOS does not allow websites to properly access device orientation and therefore this app cannot function"


I wish I had come to that conclusion a week ago, but I'm in too deep now. It's for a little side project, and it seems like the majority of people I want to show it to have iPhones.


Or even just not caring about users at the poles? How many users are you expecting to have in Greenland or Antarctica?


I should have said zenith, not poles. The issues occur when the device is pointed up at the sky or down at the ground. Edit: Though I would imagine it won't work too well at the poles either!


Are you saying you have to fight gimbal lock just to find which way to rotate the screen on iPhone? That was a problem on the 1960s lunar missions, no idea it'd happen in such a mundane application


This is why orientation should always be reported as a unit quaternion (or if you strongly care about using only 3 vs. 4 numbers, using "modified Rodrigues parameters", the stereographic projection of a unit quaternion).


Pretty much. The iPhone browser api only exposes compass data in one dimension, around the z-axis. So there is indeed gimbal lock-like behavior near the axis. Which is crazy since the magnetometer is 3 dimensional.


Can you use media queries and guess orientation from screen width?


For my use case, I want to know the exact way the phone is pointed in all three axis. Which requires more information than determining the screen orientation (and which I believe can be done as you say). Unfortunately, the term "orientation" seems to be overloaded and used to describe both concepts.


Makes sense. Then it's 100% because Apple wants to force developers to implement an app.


Same thing I thought.


Just out of curiosity because you might know: does the deviceorientation event (without absolute) work on iOS? Because I've just used it for a toy website of mine and have no iPhone to test.


I have used in this app: https://mhealth.jmir.org/2020/1/e13756 it's OK for relative orientation, but not for absolute values


Agreed, the deviceorientation does work fine for relative orientation. I've been able to hack it for absolute orientation. What I am doing is: 1) taking the relative orientation euler angles from the event and converting them to a quaternion for easier manipulation. 2) taking the webkitCompassHeading from same deviceorientation event. 3) Calculating the "relative heading", eg how far the relative orientation is from its fake north. 4) calculating the difference between the relative and actual heading. 5) building a quaternion to describe the bearing difference, eg how far the relative orientation need to be corrected by spinning around the z-axis. 6) Multiply the two quaternions to get the final absolute orientation quaternion. This does work, though has the issues I mentioned previously, and relies on the undocumented fact the the relative orientation is actually absolute with respect to the down/gravity vector.


I haven't tested it on iPhone, but on Android my browser code for Euler angles works just fine. You can find the demonstration at the end of this blog post https://dandanua.github.io/posts/the-spin-of-a-human-body/


I read this and thought surely the center of gravity still has to pass over the bar. But right you are, the center of gravity can pass below the bar since it's just the average point of the mass. Cool!


I seemed to remember reading something similar about Austin's buses when they went fare-free in the 80s. I found this linked in the Austin CapMetro wiki page: http://www.nctr.usf.edu/pdf/473-132.pdf


This reminds me of MetaFilter, where a one-time $5 payment is required to post. Just this small speedbump seems to do a pretty good job of keeping opportunistic trolls and vandals off the site. "Free" is too often an invitation to abuse.


They mentioned in the press conference that it was very unlikely that the implosion would have happened after more listening equipment was in use on the scene. I believe there were sonar buoys dropped on Monday, so the implosion likely happened before then.


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