Electrical Engineering

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12:11 AM

@Shalvenay Twice: repair of a blown capacitor and speculative question about pricing. Oh, and this pricing question too.

W5VO

Eh, the question about pricing wasn't that bad

Nick Alexeev

Not the right material for HNQ, thought. It gives an impression that it is a right kind of question for EE.SE .

W5VO

You know you can just cancel the HNQ now, right?

Nick Alexeev

Yes, I know that mods can unHNQ questions. I do that regularly. That's a useful tool.
I hope, that they are re-training the HNQ algorithm with that feedback.

W5VO

nah, HNQ is a dumb algorithm. I doubt they'll try something like that.

Nick Alexeev

12:27 AM

I was never able to find the description of the HNQ algorithm. Was it ever published?

W5VO

I thought it was

A: How do the "arbitrary hotness points" work on the new Stack Exchange home page and in the sidebar on questions?

Basically what's documented here: What formula should be used to determine "hot" questions? We have a few tweaks: Succeeding questions from the same site are penalized by increasing amounts. So, the first question from SO in the list gets multiplied by 1.0, the second by 0.98, the third ...

though that may just be a "last publicly documented method". As you can see, there's not a lot going on to discriminate questions

Nick Alexeev

I see. Somehow, I always had a feeling that lay questions are over-represented in the HNQ. Maybe they aren't hotted more often, but they stay hot longer.

W5VO

Once they go hot, they'll get proportionally higher votes. Also, that means that interesting technical questions need more upvotes

So getting +4-5 upvotes and an answer quickly is a good way to do that.

2 hours later…

Nick Alexeev

2:45 AM

Folks, at the moment of writing we've got 140-odd questions on the close review queue. Could you take a stab at the close review queue, if you haven't done so recently?

Shalvenay

@W5VO yes, it's really disheartening when you post a very well-documented technical question and it sits there and languishes with no votes or other activity :/

2 hours later…

deostroll

4:41 AM

@JRE how to perform this particular test?

Nick Alexeev

4:55 AM

@deostroll Taste-test the datasheet.

13 hours later…

Nick Alexeev

5:38 PM

Q: Can a Foucault's current brake be used on the rails themselves to brake trains?

Your typical Foucault's current brakes operate on a disk, which is placed in an electromagnetic field in order to transform kinetic energy into heat without friction. The problem is that the disk still overheats, just like an usual disk brake. In the case of railways this also needs that the whee...