ballooney

Trivial asside: almost everyone on this site says ‘disclaimer’ when they mean ‘disclosure’ - unless it’s some cutesy humble tongue-in-cheek thing?

I can vouch for the testing and safety overhead when compared to what the layman might imagine. A friend of mine designs the ticket barriers for the London Underground, among other customers, and the work that goes into ensuring the safety of those autonatic saloon-door style gates is enormous - you can just imagine what a poorly designed or faulty one might do to, I dont know, a pregnant person. It’s definitely a case of the 80:20 rule applying to the design vs the finessing and safety.

1) You're lying. Read the article - it's not all American companies. [Edit: parent changed their post after claiming 'All' the fines were to US companies]

2) Perhaps if it's mostly US companies it's because they are more abusive of their market power, a mentality incubated in the lobbying culture of American politics and corresponding spinelessness of regulators.

Easy - half the conference venues don't come with dongles, or if they do the AV guy is dealing with a crisis in one of the other 17 conference rooms and won't be able to get to your one within your 20 min slot (this happens A Lot. I do have my own HDMI-VGA though, but the VGAs seem to by dying out thankfully).

SD cards - I've never had an SLR or a high end mirrorless camera (but i haven't bought either for maybe 18 months) that's been able to transfer through itself at anything like the speed of a fast SD card in the slot. Makes a big difference when you want to dump 64GB of pics. As for dust, my favourite camera has been to Syria, the desert southwest of the USA several times, morocco, antarctica on a sailing ship (so being sprayed a lot), and not to mention my local beach. Aswell as just being the camera i throw into my shoulder bag when going out. Unless the photographers in your own office are war photographers or dirt-bike specialists, I've probably given my kit a harder life than they have. I've never had an issue with pushing dust into the SD slot of my camera or laptop. I did however dent the ISO knob on my camera when trying to tether it to my laptop when sailing across drake's passage, and a wave tipped the boat and I instinctively grabbed the macbook and let the camera hit the deck. I learnt my lesson. Fair point on micro SD though, but I have never used them for photography. I would probably be concerned too about fumbling, especially if wearing gloves.

Parent was downvoted but shouldn't be. A lot of people really seem to need to believe that Elon Musk designed the falcon rockets or the teslas. This is simply not the case.

What made SpaceX work is that he found most of the good people stuck in bad organisations already in the space sector, put them under one roof (which almost never happens in aerospace with it's goverment-funded pork-barrel contracts), and provided both the money and the will. Having both, rather than one-of, those last two things (the money and the will) are almost unheard of in aerospace anyway, and are a super-power. They gave the Tom Muellers of this world they space they need to do their work, and they had them co-located with the manufacturing, and they cared about manufacturing techniques, and they made a product. It probably was, and maybe still is, the nearest a company has come to taking Skunkwork's crown as an example of how aerospace engineering can be done right.

He likes to geek out, and he has vision, but he's a pusher of engineers rather than an engineer, and he sails very close to the wind with over-pushing his people. To the extent that any historical or fictional comparison is apt, he's more a Henry Ford than a Tony Stark.

Strawman - most people are not working in a cafe or park, but an office where you have to plug your laptop into actual things - projectors and so on. And almost all the projectors I use at my work, my customers' work, or the last few conferences I've been at, are HDMI - which is cool because I have an HDMI port right there on the side of my [2014, may-it-last-forever] macbook pro. It's next to the SD card slot where I can put in the SD cards from my rather nice digital camera, so I can edit photos when travelling. I earn money from photography, so as someone who is technically therefore pro, both of these connectors are useful for pro work, that isn't just typing things in cafés.

Such as all the adaptors and dongles you need to turn it back into a functional laptop.

It's 2018 and people still credulously report whatever pr optimised nonsense tech-time tuple Musk has said. _Of course_ you will not be flying New York-London on a rocket for $500 in 2028.

In which Dean Moriarty writes a paper.

Aerospikes are not a dramatic improvement in anything. They just buy you a bit more nozzle efficiency, and that only really comes into its own for ssto.

Hobby model rocket people have been doing this for some time, e.g. this effort which is about two decades old:

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

Also chiming in - I do control stuff in aerospace, Kalman Filters are the industry standard, have been so for decades, verging on low-tech now. Lots of interest in online particle filters in my little niche currently.

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design number 41:

  41. There's never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there's always enough time to do it over.

http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

[I appreciate you probably realise this:] Selection bias - you only see one news-aggregator-site linus rant every 3-4 months and not the other 1347 normal coder and leader emails in between that allow him to maintain the most successful bit of open source software in existence.

"Sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it."

-- J. von Neumann, about Oppenheimer

It's very specifically not a holy book because it does not hide any reasoning or ask you to take anything on faith. Quite the opposite - all of his working is shown, every assumption is stated, and you are very explicitly given the tools to calculate and update his work as new advances and considerations emerge. There is a whole chapter on not-the-UK, and how the math changes. The reason the book was such a global success is not because it was a statement of opinion about UK energy policy, but a proper treatment in how to thing about energy production and use, the tools for which can be applied anywhere.

If you enjoyed this sort of first-order quantitative reasoning about energy use and production, can I recommend the book 'Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air' by the late Prof David Mackay? It's essentially 300 pages just like the grandparent post, about making an energy policy that adds up, given various bounds of allowable CO2 emissions etc.

Free online, and a the best seller physical book in the field: https://www.withouthotair.com/

They guy who figured out how to land a rocket on a barge is a spacex employee who is an expert in control theory, who was probably hired by another employee of Elon Musk. So I’m not really sure what you comparison means.

'almost' equally well is a bit qualitative; one of the main advantages of a kalman filter is that it's predictive and so doesn't suffer from the lag that a simple low-pass filter has. But as you say, a car is not a missile so the degree to which the performance of a LPF is worse than a KF may not be significant.

Also it’s remit is much wider than launchers. It is still hampered by the politic imperative to do all the things that make projects late and slow - spreading all the work around as many states, companies and people as possible. Having a ton of process and paperwork to try and manage it all.

Lest anyone be taken in by this:

Myhrvold, and his outfit Intellectual Ventures, was/is one of the most egregious patent trolls of the lot. Their business model relies on victims being scared off and settling out of court. Courts, and IV's harassment targets, are beginning to become wise to this and their claims are being taken to court and thrown out - effectively breaking IV's business model. This has all been chronicled ad nauseam on HN. So perhaps, realizing this, we're now getting a flurry of puff-pieces to re-write the story ahead of them having to figure out how to make an honest living.

No amount of PR lipstick should redeem this particular pig.

Rule 6 of Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design:

6. Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

I haven't paid-by-the-byte for 4G for about half a decade now. It's unlimited with my reasonably priced monthly contract (about $30USD/mo), from a mainstream provider in the UK (Three), lets me tether and gives me free data when I'm abroad too (I'm in the US and France a few times a year typically). I hope this doesn't sound too let-them-eat-cake, but I'm surprised that anyone with work-on-app-in-a-café-in-a-trendy-city lifestyle wouldn't have a sim plan with unlimited, or at least a very high allowance of, data.

When people criticize 'Silicon-Valley-Types' for only being able to think of technical solutions to social problems, it's exactly this kind of thing they have in mind.

Just read this thread - the way medical care is paid for in the US is batshit-insane, injured people not wanting to call an ambulance incase they lose their house - and reads like a history book about european medieval history. The solution is not more apps, it's a proper healthcare system like almost every other developed country.

'different then' is one of the clues in online written communication that the writer speaks American English (with some confusion), 'different than' is 'correct' american english (though seems odd to me as an english english [or just simply: english] speaker), 'different to' is, I believe, more common in english english but not american english, and 'different from' is probably the most correct and universal formulation, and I use the word 'correct' with all the usual caveats when applied to language.

That’s specifically german though, because of its pretty abyssmal 20th Century, rather than specifically american. That said most modern west europeans do find american nationalism and exceptionalism a bit odd, especially after they’ve visited and US and seen the reality of most people’s situation. If anyone reads this and thinks I’m being unfair, especially on california-centric HN, consider if you’ve ever hosted a western european friend in SF and had them comment about just how abnormal the level of homelessness and mental illness is there. And how they looked at you/us when you said ‘well it’s because SF is a warmer place to sleep on the streets’ as if that was fine.

This article is honestly quite objective, and should invite some introspection if your first instinct is to be offended.

Others might also find this History of Lisp at JPL (used on both spacecraft and rovers) interesting:

http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

To be clear to everyone else, the parent and the grandparent have just described respectively conference papers and journal papers. Journal papers are usually a bit longer and represent more work, conference papers are usually shorter and take a bit less time. This of course is a generalization.

For example, a PhD thesis might be the full written-up version of 3-4 conference papers you'd have published in the course of your PhD, and then you might condense the important part of your thesis into a single journal paper afterwards, but this is only a vague example and there are many ways of skinning this cat. There are many examples of extremely short conference papers that have had a major impact in their field, and there are _millions_ of completely forgettable journal papers.

The above broadly holds for any of the scientific research disciplines with which I'm familiar.

Antenna-gate (the iPhone antenna not working well enough if you held the phone) happened while Jobs was in charge.

To be clear, it's not so much they are using ML to predict wind speeds at different altitudes; they use a forecast model like everyone else for that. The clever bit is being able to control your altitude such that you find favorable wind-altitude tuples to be in to keep you generally in one spot over days/weeks. It's sort of like what ocean/circumnavigating sailors do but in a higher dimensional space, both literally and in your search algorithm. Fascinating stuff.