Internal Combustion Engine • Hacker News Board

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#411

Post by belugacat » Sun, May 02, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

nrvn wrote: post #396

I wish entire wikipedia was as informative as this one page. Would be happy to pay for some commercial encyclopedia of that kind and quality. When I was a child I absolutely loved Encarta 96. It fit on a single CD and had enough interactive material. With today’s computing, network and disk possibilities I don’t see any reasons why nowadays there is no single curated source of truth about the world around us. Instead…

Make no mistake, making articles of that level of quality requires world class skills in software engineering, communication, math, foundational engineering skills (physics/mechanical/…), etc.

The number of people on earth who can author such content is extremely low. The number of people with the vision, fundraising ability, and general meta skills needed to lead a team of people doing such work is likely even lower.

Creating an entire encyclopedia at this level of quality and interactivity would be a Herculean project.

In the meantime, we have other kinds of similar Herculean projects like Khan Academy and Wikipedia, and they’re pretty great too :)

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#412

Post by jonplackett » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:06 AM UTC

rz2k wrote: post #305

ehnto wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a fantastic metaphor, and though I am intimately familiar with engines I had never thought of the crankshaft as four simple hand cranks stuck together before.

I wonder if it was inspired by well known this classic video explaining differentials. https://youtu.be/yYAw79386WI

Great video. I wish there were videos this clear to explain everything!

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#413

Post by Siira » Tue, May 04, 2021, 6:18 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #400

Siira wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word engineer is used by anyone who 1) has an engineering degree or 2) works a field where most new practitioners have such a degree. Most of these people don't know shit, and design terrible systems that barely work (or don't work at all). Trying to elevate the word to a non-existent Plutonic ideal where it means "great engineering" is just ... pointless and faux-humble.

Real engineers are like doctors, lawyers, LMFTs... even licensed electricians have some similarity here: The point is, the “field” , has taken in a number of disasters, established a professional association, set standards for what you need to know to not be putting people at risk of dying, and created tests that new entrants have to pass in order to be certified with a title. Now, you can say that is pointless bulls…

My experience with your “licensed” professionals has been terrible. They do not meet a high bar of quality, and their services are artificially expensive, and they discriminate heavily against minorities, immigrants, and the poor in their gatekeeping.

It’s also clear to me that most experienced software developers are more qualified than most “credentialed” graduates of CS/software engineering (most of whom can’t really code).

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#414

Post by nrvn » Sat, May 08, 2021, 8:31 PM UTC

belugacat wrote: post #411

nrvn wrote: post #396

I wish entire wikipedia was as informative as this one page. Would be happy to pay for some commercial encyclopedia of that kind and quality. When I was a child I absolutely loved Encarta 96. It fit on a single CD and had enough interactive material. With today’s computing, network and disk possibilities I don’t see any reasons why nowadays there is no single curated source of truth about the world around us. Instead…

Make no mistake, making articles of that level of quality requires world class skills in software engineering, communication, math, foundational engineering skills (physics/mechanical/…), etc. The number of people on earth who can author such content is extremely low. The number of people with the vision, fundraising ability, and general meta skills needed to lead a team of people doing such work is likely even lower…

I totally get the herculeanity of the effort. But I also feel there’s vacuum in this space. And I would be happy if our children had access to a high quality source of information.

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#415

Post by gnunez » Tue, May 11, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

d110af5ccf wrote: post #289

kortilla wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those things can be as complex as an ICU engine. From a complexity perspective an ICU isn’t nearly as complex as even something as simple is a script scraping a webpages for links and queuing them up for further crawling. I’m not sure if “complex” is the word you are going for but even the TCP state machine has significantly more complexity than an ICU and that’s just a fragment of what it takes to transmit some da…

Quantifying complexity really depends on the level of abstraction though. Scraping a static webpage is simple when examined at the level of abstraction involving Python and ready made packages. An ICE is similarly simple when examined from the perspective of basic mechanics, as in the article under discussion. As you note, scraping that static webpage is no longer simple when you include as part of your assessment th…

Nicely put! I think most "real" engineers dismissal of software engineering is because we can for the most part ignore physics. This somehow seems like cheating and not mathematical enough to be "real" engineering. I've even heard the claim that discrete mathematics, graph theory, and theoretical computer science is not "real" mathematics. It should be clear that a developing complex software system like Unix, Kubernetes, Redis is engineering, but somehow others from different engineering disciplines cannot see that. After bringing so many great inventions and innovations into this world, how can we once and for all make the case that software engineering is real engineering and get the respect that this field deserves?