ballooney

There were hobbyists making thrust-vectored rockets at this scale twenty-ish years ago.

e.g. http://michael.sdf-eu.org/Gyroc/

Yeah i often look at my iphone SE and think it really needs some character.

Gladwell has made something of a career out of exactly this sort of tenuous, facile nonsense.

I know from people inside SpaceX that they have covers for the essential switch panels which they put on when Musk is around, because he objects to them for confused silly reasons (like tesla cross-marketing). The astronauts and capsule engineers know better, of course, so this is the compromise.

This might seem cynical but I mean it quite honestly: I don't miss them.

I think the cultural winds have changed anyway, post Jobs, as the wider perception of SV has gone from tech utopia to bro dystopia etc, where there's less collective naiveté and appetite for cult-worship (though still enough for a steady stream of people to throw their best years at someone else's get-rich gamble). PG probably left at the right time when he sensed the winds changing. I don't think the trajectory would have continued if he had stayed. This might all the wrong, of course.

Which is different to being in the most recognisable brands in the world, with coke, disney, manchester united, etc etc.

You’re on HN. Go to yemen and ask your question.

Absurdly not the case. You are in a bubble.

The EU is not a nation.

Don't do exaggerated e.g.'s, because the other name for them is 'lies'. I checked, there is not a single post in this comment section referencing the stability of an internet connection being a purchasing deterrent.

'The Naked And The TED' is the best criticism ever written about TED generally, and very much worth your time:

https://newrepublic.com/article/105703/the-naked-and-the-ted...

A background of arduino gives you a view of the microcontroller world that is like climbing a minaret in the smog in delhi gives you a view of the himalayas.

Hobbyists and tinkerers like us are somewhere between completely irrevelevent and mostly irrevelent when it comes to market share.

All fair, valid and noted. It’s the eve of Opportunity’s demise, and i worked on mars EDL, and the infinite tide of javascripters making statesmanly-yet-quite-mistaken proclamations on physics can feel quite disrespectful to the actual engineers who work on this stuff now, worked on the stuff on both sides in the cold war, and everyone back to goddard, tchiolkovsky and moore. But you are right. More whisky and no more HN.

It definitely counts. The effect it has on exhaust velocity is maybe 5-10%, which is a big deal when you consider that has an exponential effect on your mass fraction, i.e the percentage of total lift-off mass that is fuel vs machinery and payload.

This is completely, completely wrong. Really honestly confused nonesense. Supercooling lowers the ullage pressure, if anything increasing the need to pressurise (self or otherwise), because the self pressurisiation (the vapour pressure) is lower. So you have to do additional work to feed the pumps. The only reason to supercool is to increase the density. Your comment is quite incorrect.

No, this is all just wrong. The efficiency is because you dont throw a load of enthalpy overboard as in a gas generator. The phase is _exremely_ second order by comparison.

You’re all over this thread being wrong and confused.

Source: am a rocket engine designer.

They were originally aiming for 100km, and at early space tourism conferences (about a decade ago) would point out that other competitors (e.g. Lynx, at the time) weren't actually going to 100km so couldn't claim they were going to space (they would do this reliably, and to the growing annoyance of the audience who didn't want audience-question time hijacked for Virgin PR, e.g. in a Q&A panel that had a Lynx team member onboard, a virgin person would always ask a question like 'Just to confirm, you're not flying above 100km, the altitude at which space starts?').

However, the performance of Spaceship 2's engines has fallen short of the original design goal, making it incapable of reaching 100km, so they are now using a different definition of Space for PR purposes.

Would someone who actually _knows_ the answer (I know this will not deter the HN-reckon but worth a try) be able to comment on if/why this security gap exists?

Is it something fundamental to the different design choices, is it just which has had more test/resources thrown at it, and is the closing of the gap practical and/or on a roadmap?

Yes, the definition of linearity is that f(A) + f(B) = f(A+B), which you have contradicted in your GP post. If a transistor is fully on, then doubling the input voltage to it will not double the output, because it's already at maximum. That is very precisely not a linear device. That's why linear amplifiers, like Class A, operate the transistor in a partially switched state, where increasing the input signal (about some bias point, and with feedback to turn a real transistor into a more ideally-behaving one) gives a corresponding increase in output signal.

Class D (switching) amplifiers are _not_ linear, they trade linearity for efficiency. The article you linked to actually says this:

"Over the years, a number of different biasing schemes have been developed for amplifiers, from extremely linear Class A operation, in which the active devices essentially remain powered on through the full sinewave cycle of an input signal, to more power-efficient schemes, such as Class D, in which multiple transistors are switched on and off to conduct different portions of an input waveform."

I think what you are doing is confusing the linearity of the transistor with the linearity of the whole audio amplifier treated as a black box, which is why I suggested you rephrase your argument rather than say you are categorically wrong, however what you said was:

"The thing is that transistors’ behavior is more linear and controlled when fully on or off rather than when used as continuously variable."

... which I'm afraid is really just wrong.

That’s precisely and exactly the opposite of what ‘linear’ means when talking about the operating point of transistors. I think you should rephrase your argument.

90% of this thread is people arguing about Burning Man. n-gate practically writes itself.

His performance at the Leveson inquiry in the UK a few years ago confirmed him to be utter slime. Terrible news for Tesla if you value truth and integrity, and doesn’t do much to dispell the valuation-pyramid-scheme, spin-ever-grander-stories criticism that is often levelled at them.

This is why people suggest that terms like 'software carpentry' more accurately capture what 99.5% of programmers do than 'software engineering'.

Flask’s page doesn’t mention django, an avr microcontroller’s page doesn’t mention x86, my bash static site generator readme doesn’t mention wordpress...

None of this is strange.

No, it is not strange that there’s no mention of RISC-V.

That is the case, yes.

Yes it is, because it's a rubbish design with grossly inadequate strain relief.

Like someone else said, I would urge some Americans to have a bit more self-awareness about a lot of these issues, in that they are not absolute issues but america-specific ones (not slavery in general of course, but the modern guilt about slavery and racial segregation that is still a bit of an open wound in the USA).

A lot of the 'obvious' connotations to americans about words are simply not there for the larger anglophone world. That doesn't make their concerns invalid - just that it's not 'obvious' that the choice of words is poor.

I make no comments on the merits of this particular issue, just a general point about the context in which a lot of the debates are held, especially with non-american english speakers (e.g. antirez).

Don't buy stuff that's made in China, and optionally (but importantly) then email that CEO of the company whose stuff you decided not to buy that was made in China, explaining why.

The dragon doesn't care what you say about it so long as it's still being fed.