gangstead

Definitely read Liftoff first. Reentry picks up at the next chapter of SpaceX right where Liftoff wraps up.

Both great books.

Reentry by Eric Berger. It came out in October. It's a follow up to his book Liftoff from 2021. Great books for space nerds. Makes me really admire what Space X has accomplished while also eliminating any desire I had to work for them.

I suspect that the real problem with prioritizing by pay is that it shows that a lot of employers are using H1-B workers to put downward pressure on wages.

Also there are a lot of parties involved in gaming the complex system whose services wouldn't be needed if the solution was that simple. I think Upton Sinclair's quote applies here. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

Doesn't salary at least set a floor on what a company thinks that employee is going to add in value? They wouldn't spend dollars on salary to get dimes of extra revenue.

I would also argue that prioritizing the highest paid jobs makes displacement of US workers less likely. It would raise the bar for everyone.

One idea to replace the H1-B lottery that I've seen on HN is to sort the applications by salary and let in the top XX highest paid.

Do you have any thoughts on that? Is this one of those "why don't they just..." type of ideas that people with first hand knowledge know is majorly flawed?

In the NasaSpaceFlight coverage they caught an anomaly with one of the SRBs. You can see the cone burn through, burn loose and tumble away. Centaur burn was an extra 20ish seconds to compensate.

I get a lot more enjoyment out of billionaires spending their money on rockets and super sonic planes than buying land in Hawaii and kicking native people off of it.

My friend made his own Nerves powered sprinkler system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS3Iap-2umQ

I believe he's still using it to this day.

I'd like to expand on this and clarify for anyone reading this that it's not just using the same type of engines as the shuttle. They are literally the same reusable RS-25 engines taken off the shuttles over a decade ago and used for one final expendable launch. Likewise the SRB segments are reused from shuttle launches, but reconfigured and expended for one more launch on SLS. The $32 Billion spent so far on SLS have been to rearrange pieces from the shuttle parts bin.

There are further contracts to make new RS-25 engines and SRBs optimized for expendability once they run out of old shuttle equipment.

Wikipedia says they have 4 Crew Dragons in service, 1 under construction. - Crew 8 is docked at ISS - Polaris Dawn is on the launch pad scheduled for Monday. It is configured for a space walk, so I think that means it doesn't have the ISS docking adapter installed - Crew 9 is launching in September (with 2 or 4 astronauts) - Fram2 mission is in December. I think it is going to have the viewing cupola installed, so no port

I don't know how fast a Dragon could be refitted with the docking adapter so maybe the other 2 aren't available on any sort of emergency basis.

The emergency plan for Butch and Suni until Crew 9 gets there is either YOLO Starliner or lay on the bulkhead of Crew 8 below the 4 astronaut seats, not wearing space suits since the Starliner suits can't be hooked up to Dragon.

I always figured it was so that the bridge acts as a storage buffer for backed up traffic so you don't get the ramp to 635 eastbound so backed up that there is stopped traffic on 75 southbound.

I mean you still end up with that at rush hour but I think that's what they are trying to do. There is no number or lanes they could add that would prevent it from being a parking lot twice a day.

Exactly right. If a bunch of thrusters don't fire up again you now have a huge piece of debris at risk of colliding with the ISS. This probably gives NASA the most pause before doing an unmanned Starliner exit. Having people on board Starliner might be able to recover from more thruster problems but then there'd also be people on a death trap. So an unmanned Starliner might be risking as much life as a manned Starliner and NASA has no idea how much.

As for your earlier question: yes. Starliner has to leave before Crew 9 can dock. And their rules are it won't launch Crew 9 until there is a port for it to dock to.

On the ISS there are 4 ports on the Russian side only compatible with the Soyuz / Progress ships and 4 for the US side. 2 are "Common Berthing Mechanism" (CBD) used by Cygnus cargo modules (and the original Dragon 1) and 2 are "International Docking System Standard" (IDSS) used by newer Dragon 2, Starliner, "and future" vehicles.

The result is that before a second Dragon can launch Starliner must leave. If Butch and Suni aren't on it then Crew 9 arrives with 2 empty seats and 2 new space suits. The contingency exit plan in between Starliner leaving and Crew 9 arriving is for Butch and Suni to lay on the floor of Crew 8 Dragon without pressure suits below the 4 Dragon crew members (their Starliner suits can't plug into Dragon's systems).

That is the date they will send up a half full Dragon for Crew 9 Mission, which will return home in February. They aren't changing its return date, just how many people it launches with. Crew 9 can't take off until there is a free docking port so Starliner needs to be gone (crewed or not) before Dragon can launch (with 2 or 4 people depending on how Starliner leaves).

The author says his cancellation was prevented by Travelers not sending out a non renewal. Is it really just delayed for a year? Certainly they will"fix the glitch" and make sure to not renew his policy correctly the next go around.

I've been to the last 3 Starship Launches, it's only a 10 hour drive each way! I hope I'm able to go to everyone and to eventually see a booster catch in person.

Everyday Astronaut did a great writeup on seeing a launch in South Texas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWvHrih-Juk&t=795s

My preferred way is to get a hotel room on the south end of the island (Everyday Astronaut recommends Margaritaville and I agree). I woke up an hour before launch and walked a mile down the beach with my kids to Isla Blanca park. Coming from off island you'll have to leave much earlier because the bridge onto the island becomes a parking lot.

Hearing protection is probably wise, but it's a different kind of "loud". You feel it in your chest. Looking at the distances you are much closer to a much bigger rocket in South Padre than in Florida.

The most important thing is to get down at least a day early and drive over to the rocket. Starbase and the OLM are on a public road so you just pull over and look straight up at the world's biggest rocket. Also plan on being there a couple extra days to account for delays. Second most important thing is to go to Hopper Haus (Starbase themed bar/restaurant in Port Isabel).

People always say to me they'd like to join, when's the next launch? Driving down there is a leap of faith since there is only an announcement 4-5 days out and the launch license sometimes isn't issued until the day before. So you have to be ready and have a flexible schedule.

That was not my experience with Node.js and C++. The options were to either accept mediocre performance and all JS/TS or start writing the important bits with the Node-API.

You have to know a lot about Rust to write performant Deno.

Is there a list of language code smells? If the best parts of your language come from another language are you better off skipping the middle layer now instead of later when there's more code to rewrite?

I wonder how the pricing works out. I look at the failure rates and my general take away is "buy Western Digital" for my qty 1 purchases. But if you look within a category, say 14TB drives, they've purchased 4 times as many Toshiba drives as WD. Are the vendors pricing these such that it's worth a slightly higher failure rate to get the $/TB down?

Are you sure the combination is Welbutrin and metformin? What you are describing sounds like the combination of bupropion (Welbutrin) and Naltrexone. The two generic medicines are packaged together as Contrave, a branded drug for obesity with no generic. They are much cheaper and readily available as two generic prescriptions.

I'm in the same boat as you but with ZebBound. EliLilly makes the starter dose (2.5 mg) accessible but all other doses are unavailable. I suspect their strategy is to get people to have a good first month then go screaming to their employers when they can't continue.

I'm transitioning to the Bupropion / Naltrexone combo and while I'd like to stay with ZebBound I would still be happy if it works half as well as ZebBound (at 1/10th the cost!).

I had one employer that offered that years ago. If you opted out of the healthcare plan they gave you $100 / pay period instead. I think the goal was to get married people to choose their spouses plan if they could. It seemed to me that the amount offered was too low to tempt anyone to actually take it. In my case it would have added like $300 per month to my spouses plan.

Totally agree. I'm not usually in the habit of defending millionaires. But I thought there used to be a justification for private jet travel of maximizing the CEO's time. The company is investing $20M per year in this asset and he's probably flying for meetings all the time and if a private jet cuts a couple hours of airport transit / wait time off of each flight it's probably worth it for the increased amount of meetings he can attend.

Maybe that can be achieved for less than $1.7M, I'm not informed enough. This source https://simpleflying.com/gulftream-g700-cost-to-own-operate-.... says it's a little more than $2M per year to operate a Gulfstream G700, I don't know what kind of jets CEOs are using these days.

What was the outcome? Free car? A strongly worded letter and you wrote another check?

They've also slashed prices https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/fisker-sl... . Presumably that's on existing inventory as the manufacturing is paused. So even if they do cash your check it won't be as big as it used to be.

It looks like bankruptcy is imminent. If they do go under does that mean there would be no one there to collect the telemetry? Would an electric car made by a bankrupt company be the first electric car not to constantly be spying on its owners?

I've never seen blurring in my images. Is that something that they add when you do API access? I'm running SD 1.5 and SDXL 1.0 models locally. Maybe I'm just not prompting for things they deem naughty. Can you share an example prompt where the result gets blurred?

He mentioned having a private, firewalled VLAN. Is there anywhere to get more info or example setups for the beginner homelabber? I've got Unifi gear, I poke around the interface. I realize I can make new VLANs, but what makes them isolated/private?

Also I see his complaints about half assed security but I actually am kind of relieved. If the security was implemented well we wouldn't be able to make our own man-in-the-middle prometheus exporters!

Since they raised $61 million (source https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/05/cloud-native-container-man...) they probably had way more team than $10 million could support. Since they raised the VC money I guess that downsizing to a team that the business can sustain is not an option.

> smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side

I've worked at a couple consultancies and they were always chasing after that recurring product revenue. I grew to believe that it isn't possible under that business model.

When you are running a consultancy you are in the business of marking up developer hours: find a client to sign a contract for $150 / hour and hire a consultant who will do the job for $100k/year salary. Then convince them to work as many hours as possible for their fixed salary, plus the carrot of a bonus payout every once in a while if everyone bills lots of hours.

Having that developer spend any time working on the company's product causes all sort of problems. The most immediate is the loss of revenue. But also now this employee might see working on the product as cutting into their bonus since they are billing less hours. Everyone wants some of the upside if the side product generates revenue but how do you split it between people who worked directly on the product and people who worked on paying client jobs to generate the revenue so the others could work on the product? It ends up causing a rift.

The other thing I've seen while working at small and even medium sized consultancies is that they end up dependent on one large customer who calls all the shots and takes up all the available time, or all "extra" time not being billed is used working on sales for the next contract. Either way there doesn't end up being much capacity to work on cool tooling.

I'm in the process of replacing the remote+canopy module in my hands with Lutron controls. With those you can control from both the wall and the remote.

At Strange Loop this year during the keynote the organizer said he was usually signing the contract for the hosting venue 2 years in advance. I'm not saying a first year 200 person conference has to plan as far out as an established X,000 person conference, but 4 months out is cutting it close. I'd suspect all first year conferences are very chaotic as the organizers learn to go from 0 to 1 so good for them for pulling it off.

It's time to start working on next year's conference and grant proposal.

Never heard of it either but I like it. I assume their heads are up in the sky and coming up with product ideas that are very far out there.