Comment by onphonenow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onphonenow | Hacker News Reader

There is something weird going on here. Is this a turf battle between FCC and FAA? Does FAA not really have tech experts anymore?

This process has been going since 2011, with lots of input from stakeholders (the usual slow govt process). The FCC carefully studies interference before opening a band up.

The guard band is absolutely ridiculous at 220Mhz - I thought this was a typo when I saw it. Looking at Boeing comments, Boeing had requested a max guard band of 110Mhz and the FCC doubled that.

We have 30 - 40 countries already operating mobile services in this band. I haven't heard of credible reports of interference.

Finally, longstanding RF rules require that your RF equipment operate in its assigned band. The fault here, if any, lies with airlines and aircraft mfgs to update their equipment if needed. That said, I doubt it's needed.

So seriously, there is some weird FAA stuff going on now.

We wonder why the US infrastructure costs so much. Instead of doing some tests in the years that this was in the cards, the FAA is now throwing up all sorts of roadblocks, just as biden gets ready to spend $1.2 trillion on infrastructure.

Seriously, if this is a real issue, have every airline land near a test deployment of C-band, and figure out which altimeters are so pathetic they need a 200Mhz guard band.

That pretty well fits the typical mindset of the past decade. Nobody wants to take risks and build shit, everyone is instead looking for a noble excuse to get their share of money and authority without actually doing any hard work.

Sounds like my current company. Devs have been complaining about how the tooling has become progressively worse but no one with a fat paycheck cares...so it doesn't get done...until something catches fire.

Does your company offer fat paychecks for improving internal tooling?

Developers who make the lives of their peers at work easier are well-liked.

The people who decide your paychecks typically don't understand what you're doing anyways, so I wouldn't worry about that.

Sometimes.

If you make a tool that has been in use for years - long enough that engineers who turned to management are now in senior management position remember using and liking it back int the day - then you can get a good paycheck to maintain it. Of course this assumes that the tool is still relevant 25 years from when you first created it. Note that this is about you creating and maintaining the tool, taking over someone else's tool might work, but is probably seen as a job for a junior developer.

In some cases you can wait for things to get really bad and then be rewarded for saving the day. (I strong oppose this - a good engineer should see problems and fix them before they get that bad)

You can spend 10% of your time maintaining tools so long as the other 90% has great value. Great value means you see the market need and develop the first prototype that demonstrates the idea works (then turn this over to a new team to make production worthy while you go on to invent something else).

You can run numbers to prove that your tool makes a difference. (Some at Facebook can show hundreds of thousands of dollars saved as a result of their tools)

There are probably others - but none are easy to get into.

Many don't because that type of work doesn't directly and obviously drive revenue, doesn't have slick customer-facing UX, and isn't on the radar of product or management. For every shop that actually has their act together there are two that fall into this trap; from what I gather consulting and contracting places in particular are quite prone to this line of thinking since the distinction between billable and non-billable work underscores this further and leads to especially perverse incentive structures.

Yet in so many consulting firms people are just twiddling their thumbs without any work.

> Does your company offer fat paychecks for improving internal tooling?

It does. But not to me. There are entire teams with millions of dollars of budget to improve tooling.

But of course they only do what they like. And my management doesn't care enough to bring our complaints to them. Individual engineer complaints are ignored.

I'm on a project with 3 developers and 5(!) project mismanagers. The developers have laptops with 8 GB of RAM, which has to swap 4 GB to disk if they simply open their IDE. When they type or click things, it's like a slide-show.

I raised this with the PMs repeatedly as a significant project risk. Oh... we can't do anything about that they chorused. That's a different department, that's a different budget, etc, etc... Excuse after excuse.

The PM salaries sum to about $1M per annum, but 3 laptops are just too hard for them to organise. Too hard. Can't be done. Just stop asking. Shh. We're busy.

As we see here, it's much easier to criticize then to build.

yeah i buy my own ram lol (for my work laptop) that 100$ will save me years of stress if anything remotely looks like slideshow when it isnt supposed to

Sounds like one of these companies that just got some investor money, hired friends of friends, and are enjoying the ride. There are exactly zero reasons to try and save the sinking ship. If you succeed, they will just hire more buddies over your head. If they fail, you will be scapegoated.

I would say, be nice and polite, take your time learning whatever tech you need to get a better job, prepare for interviews, get an offer, shake hands and move on...

Are you at a large corporation? A government agency? Just curious about what kind of project has more managers than developers. That's an amazing level of waste and incompetence to allow that to even happen.

It’s a large org, but I’ve seen the same kind of attitude even at small companies.

I once had to do development on a 640x480 resolution screen because those fancy large monitors are “too expensive”. That place had less than 30 staff.

Worked in defense in a previous life. Spent a lot of time in DC and northern Virginia.

Take any amazing organization that does great things, give it a bunch of money, and have the revenue stream not get impacted by failure. You get rot. You get IBM 1960 vs IBM the 2010s - present horror show. You get Ford in 1920 vs Ford in 1980. And this isn't limited to the private sector. It's a feature of massive organizations where revenue is divorced from success.

The US Federal Government is an utter horror show. It was once an amazingly capable collection of efficient, nimble organizations. It could hire rogues and mavericks when needed, and was able to fire the desk-riders too. It's now a rotted-out shell. Success happens in-spite of, and never because-of, the organizations themselves.

I always invite people to go and work with one of the US Fed contractors or agencies. Go look at their job postings. Look at the energy levels of the team members. It's somewhere between a DMV and a mausoleum. Ask yourself if you honestly think they need more money or just far fewer, far higher paid staff with the same or even less budget. Then ask yourself if these organizations are capable of understanding, let alone governing, complex domains.

Bingo. See also: many nonprofit organizations for the exact same reason. DC is a world unto itself.

When was the this golden age of US federal government efficiency?

You probably meant this in jest, but a few projects come to mind such as the federal highways, the moon landing, the Manhattan project.

I doubt we'd be able to do that today at at least the same efficiency.

Most of these projects were driven by competition with USSR. I.e., push for results under limited resources. With globalization we have eliminated it and are now left to rot, splinter and wait until the competition between the shards of the former empire sparks progress again.

Except, there's also China with superior morale, superior education and superior efficiency, that might have better plans for the resources left behind a fallen empire...

The United States appears to only know how to wage war and even that has been iffy since WWII. China is poised to decimate us. They’ve been playing the long game for decades now. What have we been doing? Enriching defense contractors and having very little to show for it.

Because the general public doesn't care neither about China, nor about institutional accountability. The media diverts their attention towards conveniently picked unquantifiable problems, so they are busy fighting each other over minor differences, while refusing to notice that BOTH sides are being quietly pushed into poverty via the post-2008 economic policies.

(Late, I know -- a comment in this thread was referenced a few days later.) Yeah, 2008 was a banner year for the U.S. economy (not to mention the world economies). The economy was humming along so smoothly that, IIRC, McCain was able to take a vacation from his busy presidential campaign for a little rest and relaxation. And then Obama had to come along and ruin everything. Bummer! :(

The whole “China long game” feels so lazy. Did you forget that this is the same Chinese government that isn’t resilient enough to handle challenges to it (HK, Taiwan, Tibet, Tianimen Square (sp?)) and it’s the same government where Evergrande is happening because local governments in China just feel like reporting numbers because they’re scared that Xi will get mad if they report real numbers instead of “growth forever”.

China also has a huge population problem coming and it’s likely that they have already peaked economically (you’ll notice states like China get much more belligerent and bellicose as they fail ala Russia) and even that is due to government mismanagement.

So, my point is China isn’t some grand strategic master. They are a country with their own problems, likely even worse than most countries because problem exposition is strongly discouraged.

This doesn’t mean that America or any other country doesn’t have problems, but China isn’t particularly special here.

> Chinese government that isn’t resilient enough to handle challenges to it (HK, Taiwan, Tibet, Tianimen Square (sp?))

Uh, what?

HK democracy for example is seen as such a threat to China that it must defacto invade HK to stop democracy from overthrowing the CCP. Same with these other areas and Chinese involvement.

> HK democracy for example is seen as such a threat to China that it must defacto invade HK to stop democracy from overthrowing the CCP.

Which it has largely done, and moves on. Saying it's not resilient enough to handle the situation seems to be wishful thinking in that case (and is obviously false in the case of Tiananmen Square or Tibet.)

That’s my point. The CCP appears so weak that anything scary must be attacked viciously. Admit no fault. Allow no dissent. If the CCP was stable and strong it wouldn’t need to invade HK. The invasion demonstrates the weakness.

Oh no, it's not a weakness. It's the authoritarian version of a team building exercise.

Perhaps not efficiency. Accomplishment. With limited budgets.

I'll take shipbuilding, tank manufacture, aircraft construction, and logistics for World War Two, from a prior activity of about nil, as an example of accomplishment.

I don't think guaranteed revenue is the problem, it's guaranteed employment.

We tried tying money to success in our education system with No Child Left Behind and it was a disaster. When you have an organization that is struggling to make effective use of their budget, the solution is to replace the ineffective leadership, not decimate their budget and expect them to do better.

Japanese business school philosophy seems to be fire the leaders first, then the followers. It's a sort of 'both' solution spread over a couple of fiscal cycles.

If you ever get bought by a Japanese conglomerate and your boss gets fired, rather than being relieved you should be worried, because you're next if things don't improve. I can't fault that logic, but it does seem to make at least some westerners a little complacent, cross-purposefully.

> The US Federal Government is an utter horror show. It was once an amazingly capable collection of efficient, nimble organizations. It could hire rogues and mavericks when needed, and was able to fire the desk-riders too. It's now a rotted-out shell. Success happens in-spite of, and never because-of, the organizations themselves.

Not sure how this is related to your point about money, but I do think it's cultural. To work in the civil service right is not something our current culture rewards and/or admires. As such, you get a paucity of talent, hustle, and hard workers.

“The punishment suffered by the wise who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of bad men.” - Plato

To me, the entire article reads like the airlines are using outdated technology but they don't want to foot the bill for updating it. That would also nicely explain why this isn't a problem for the exact same airplanes landing in Europe.

> The guard band is absolutely ridiculous at 220Mhz

Wow. The whole FM radio band spans about 20MHz, less than 1/10th the range of their guard band.

Their overall guard is 200Mhz on each side, so 400Mhz total, and even WITH that guard they are saying they have interference. This is what makes so little sense to me.

You should have an emitter frequency in the 200Hz range? sure, you sweep it, but you shouldn't need a total of 400Mhz for your guard.

Any conversation around the 5g rollout was colour washed from day one. I assume that happened naturally but who knows really. I have seen very very little informative conversation online, mainly because it became something like the current vaccine debate where the middle line is drowned out by the "believers", and the "crazies". I'm not really surprised to see seemingly routine issues go unnoticed until now.

I agree. It is too bad that reasonable, moderate conversation gets drowned out by the true believers and the conspiracy theorists fighting it out.

I don't think 5g is evil but I don't see the technical or economic need for it. Replacing 4G infrastructure that is just a few years old and has plenty of bandwidth doesn't make much sense to me.

What's the middle line on vaccines? Genuinely curious about your window of reasonableness on this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com