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That's exactly the content I'm on HN for

by bkfh 6y ago

andarleen 6y ago
Rare gem - the bulk is made of open source stuff no one asked for, rants against employers, and weird calls to revolution. Worth staying for the rare ones tho.
- unixhero 6y ago
  Those open source tools are sometimes how I stay employed. Wouldn't want to be without HN.
  - andarleen 6y ago
    True - but I am referring to useless open source posts. Forgot to add those claiming OOP, code documentation, and so on, are useless. Waste of time and are a distraction from what you mentioned.
amelius 6y ago
Yes, this is cool to see. But at the same time it shows that rocket tech is not as difficult as people make it out to be. (Rockets were difficult when we didn't have computers.) Also, some universities have student teams which regularly launch similar rockets. I'm personally hoping for someone to build an IC fab or even a wafer stepper in their garage.
- humbledrone 6y ago
  > But at the same time it shows that rocket tech is not as difficult as people make it out to be. It really doesn't. The scale model probably weighs a few pounds where as the real Falcon Heavy weighs 3 million pounds [1]. Think about what a different scale that is! Also note that the scale model's (really cool) test flight failed -- with the real Falcon Heavy that lesson would cost something like $150M. I think this is kind of similar to: it's really easy to query/serve a SQL database even if it's a few tens of terabytes in size. But make it a few tens of exabytes, and things are dramatically more difficult due to the scale. The architecture that works at the terabyte size (single machine) falls over completely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy
- Retric 6y ago
  This thing doesn’t fly as high as a bottle rocket. What makes building rockets hard not the avionics but economics and the good old rocket equation. A cool model is really solving a very different but still fun problem.

That's exactly the content I'm on HN for

by bkfh 6y ago

That's exactly the content I'm on HN for

Rare gem - the bulk is made of open source stuff no one asked for, rants against employers, and weird calls to revolution. Worth staying for the rare ones tho.

unixhero 6y ago
Those open source tools are sometimes how I stay employed. Wouldn't want to be without HN.
- andarleen 6y ago
  True - but I am referring to useless open source posts. Forgot to add those claiming OOP, code documentation, and so on, are useless. Waste of time and are a distraction from what you mentioned.

amelius 6y ago

Yes, this is cool to see. But at the same time it shows that rocket tech is not as difficult as people make it out to be. (Rockets were difficult when we didn't have computers.) Also, some universities have student teams which regularly launch similar rockets. I'm personally hoping for someone to build an IC fab or even a wafer stepper in their garage.

humbledrone 6y ago
> But at the same time it shows that rocket tech is not as difficult as people make it out to be. It really doesn't. The scale model probably weighs a few pounds where as the real Falcon Heavy weighs 3 million pounds [1]. Think about what a different scale that is! Also note that the scale model's (really cool) test flight failed -- with the real Falcon Heavy that lesson would cost something like $150M. I think this is kind of similar to: it's really easy to query/serve a SQL database even if it's a few tens of terabytes in size. But make it a few tens of exabytes, and things are dramatically more difficult due to the scale. The architecture that works at the terabyte size (single machine) falls over completely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy
Retric 6y ago
This thing doesn’t fly as high as a bottle rocket. What makes building rockets hard not the avionics but economics and the good old rocket equation. A cool model is really solving a very different but still fun problem.