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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the best space vehicles today look like. We may only know decades from now. If having spy satellite photos reduces the chance of WW3 by even 1%, it’s worth the wait

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This is an interesting thought experiment. Take open source vs closed source software for example. Usually closed source with strong financial backing tends to fare better stability wise it doesn't always performance wise. Usually features can be pretty on par. For example LibreOffice and Microsoft office products. I guess where I was going with that train of thought, was this: are there any public domain knowledge repositories of what's possible now? Such as higher education research / publications or news site which aggregates advancements which happen outside the government sector? I'm guessing such info might be highly regulated, I don't know. And possibly not much use to the average civilian, so that niche of information is highly guarded / commercialized.

LibreOffice is less perfomant and has less features that its MSOffice counterpart (particularly Excel). I don't understand this comparison.

To be honest, I use both daily. MSOffice for work, and LibreOffice for personal usage and I cannot tell a difference performance wise. However, my use case is limited to simple budgetary spreadsheets, simple docs, etc. If you are working with large datasets in excel or something than things might differ. Or maybe the performance depends on the hardware both are being run on possibly. Classic case of "it works on my computer" I guess.

Depending on what you do.

We need to process, millions of documents a day, and headless libre-office is a lot faster (an order of magnitude) than driving word. So far no other library does what we need (I mostly just administers the cluster that does this).

I know that's not what people mean when they compare "speed" of office suits, but some thing's libre office does are a lot faster than MS office.

Another place where libre office is better than excel is opening and manipulating huge CSV files, with millions of rows.

I mean at this point we’re crossing over into conspiracy theory territory, but I think the most realistic scenarios are where we are doing things that are on the edge of what’s possible.

For example we probably don’t have anti-gravity, or anything that’s a huge leap from our understanding of the laws of physics. But the military may have single-stage hypersonic aircraft and spacecraft, and are keeping it close to their chest, while putting on a “show” with far less capable demonstrators as a fake out.

Wasn't trying to cross in to conspiracy territory at all, really wanted to gauge what others knew about resources determining where we are as a whole I guess. Well, as far as public domain knowledge goes. I don't believe the military / government has anything outside of what "known" physics allows of course. But at the same time we are always learning new things about how things interact and can be used.

Secret hypersonic aircraft and spacecraft are unlikely. Those put out so much energy that they're just impossible to hide.

They kept a Mach 3 plane secret for a long time…

No they really didn't. The Soviets, North Vietnamese, and North Koreans all detected and tracked the A-12 / SR-71 planes during operational missions. They didn't know all the details, but the existence wasn't at all a secret to our adversaries.

It was secret from the public. Which means there are certainly military projects right now that are also secret from us, even if Russia knows

Have you ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(aircraft)#U.S._sightin...

I've heard of it but I doubt it actually exists. There's no real mission for it that can't be done better by satellites or low-observable drones.

It doesn't take much guess work. The Delta IV has been used for more military missions than public or commercial ones. That's the space vehicle of choice for military satellites.

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)

What if it increases it by 1%?

What if 73% of statistics get made up on the spot?

Well that's one stat in the world that you definitely want to know the sign of at least!

Knowing where the other powers' silos and possibly subs are is better than worrying about it. Having them know that you know means it's not worth it for them to press the big red button. Military intelligence supports the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, which is what's keeping us all alive.

Why is this such a persistent meme that governments always have some crazy tech up their sleeves? Highly advanced military tech is mostly about intimidation so there's little benefit in keeping stuff secret for decades (actual war is mostly a numbers game so having a plane that's 2x better is not very useful if the other side has 10x as many). If anything militaries around the world tend to oversell their capabilities.

Probably because we get glimpses into how this is still true every once in a while. The gap might not be as large as it has been, but it's definitely still there in certain fields.

Some examples that immediately come to mind are the stealth Black Hawks used in the Bin Laden raid, Stuxnet, and the NSA's TAO.

F-117 also comes to mind. Amazingly the first prototypes were complete in 1977, There were rumors about it but details about the plane and program were pretty well guarded for another decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Backg...

It’s not a meme, it’s simply following history and reading declassified materials. The US government has a track record of developing advanced aircraft and weaponry in secret.

Because of revelations like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon

Granted, it's pretty wild that they fixed some film cameras to a rocket and sent it to space. But neither the delivery vehicle (Titan 3) nor the film cameras attached to parachutes was some super secretive ground-breaking tech.

The entire existence of the NRO was a secret until an unredacted congressional budget report accidentally was entered into the record in ~1990. The NRO donated two unlaunched, out-of-date satellites to NASA in 2011 and the sensors/mirrors were well ahead of anything NASA had, including the Hubble telescope. And these were the satellites that were operational decades previously some estimates saying the model was launched originally in the mid-70s.[1]

Don't underestimate what's up there. It's provably ahead of the civilian world by a long ways.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

How is the existence of the NRO a counter to "Why is this such a persistent meme that governments always have some crazy tech up their sleeves"? Like why would it matter if it was the Air Force buying satellite or some other agency like the navy or NRO?

> the sensors/mirrors were well ahead of anything NASA, including the Hubble telescope.

Hubble was designed in the 70s and launched in the 90s. So what if the NRO can spend more money and get something slightly better, how is that surprising?

> How is the existence of the NRO a counter to "Why is this such a persistent meme that governments always have some crazy tech up their sleeves"?

The NRO had crazy secret tech up its sleeves. It is a part of the U.S. government. It is far from the only such example.

I was looking at KH-11 imagery in Janes and Aviation Week in 1984.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN#/media/File:Janes...

The NRO farms out most of it’s work product now to commercial firms.

Or maybe, just maybe, the whole 'donation' thing was a plant, a mockup using then-current tech, to make people believe exactly that: that the NRO somehow was decades ahead in their sensors/mirrors game.

Big reason why this is advanced also was no one other than the military ever had a need for this kind of tech. Sometimes private sector is more advanced like when it comes to silicon fabrication, but those advancements will usually get incorporated very quickly if they are applicable.

Because they'll invest heavily in technical areas nobody cares about commercially. So their stuff will sometimes be surprisingly advanced.

Very true, the commercial sector has almost no need for things like advanced optics, radiation hard electronics, RF absorbing materials etc.

> Highly advanced military tech is mostly about intimidation so there's little benefit in keeping stuff secret for decades

That's probably true for weapons tech. It's probably very wrong for surveillance tech. I think the Snowden docs make it quite clear that the NSA does not "tend to oversell their capabilities" (at least not externally).

Lol without outting myself i worked in defense and although it could be mind numbingly slow we deff have tech at least a decade more advance than commercial sector. Mainly for the fact that there isn't a commercial market yet for the advanced stuff yet.

I was going to comment exactly this... There is a reason Google X and Microsoft R&D hire so many former DARPA PM's.

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