mandevil

34 ms·

421.
by mandevil 2y ago
Europa Clipper is literally the largest thing ever launched to the outer planets (so big that Falcon Heavy can't be reused for this mission, they have to throw it all away in order to get every last jot of performance out of the rocket
422.
by mandevil 2y ago
For things in Earth orbit (LEO all the way up to GEO) we do have some fairly worked out buses that can keep commercial missions done on budget within the fairly well developed parameters of commercial up to GEO. Have, honestly, since the 19
423.
by mandevil 2y ago
The one that gets to me is the Huygens part of the Cassini-Huygens mission. Cassini was launched October 15th, 1997, Huygens separated from the Cassini carrier on December 25th 2004, and landed on Titan on January 14th, 2005. So it was in s
424.
by mandevil 2y ago
And can introduce unusual failure cases for these bespoke missions. Mars Observer was lost in flight to Mars three decades ago, probably because of the inappropriate reuse of a satellite rocket engine. (1) The space environment out around J
425.
by mandevil 2y ago
Yes, and it is the engineering experience/skill to know when to follow the "rules" of the reference architecture, and when you're better off breaking them, that's the entire thing that makes someone a senior enginee
426.
by mandevil 2y ago
Our (1) infrastructure is ancient. PG&E started the Camp Fire wildfire in 2018 when a electrical transmission line built in 1921 failed (only lasted 97 years). That killed 85 people. 1: America for sure, I would suspect other countries
427.
by mandevil 2y ago
No, it's the wood framing underneath the synthetic stucco that can't really be easily monitored or checked that's the problem. I'm not familiar with the termite threat, but water damage issues with EIFS (the technical na
428.
by mandevil 2y ago
Homeowners insurance is tricky for both good and bad reasons. Florida's homeowner's insurance market being so dysfunctional is a blinking red warning sign that things like Hurricane Milton are only getting more common. That's
429.
by mandevil 2y ago
Valuations have "fallen" but not actually fallen: there are very bad consequences to raising what's known as a "down-round"(1) so no one is actually doing that unless they are absolutely forced to. So no company is
430.
by mandevil 2y ago
This was a great article in a great series on individual civil servants in the US Government.
431.
by mandevil 2y ago
One thing I'm not clear on is how much of this is cause and how much effect: that is, does NVidia cheerleading for something make it more popular with the tech press and then everyone else too? There are definitely large parts of the t
432.
by mandevil 2y ago
We tolerated worse gas mileage (computer controlled fuel injection, transmission, etc.), safety (anti-lock brakes), etc. We added computers because we wanted to lessen the effects of climate change and keep more people alive.
433.
by mandevil 2y ago
As long as I trim the input string to 25, that's totally fine: a character match on the first 25 characters of your mother's maiden name is perfectly acceptable, either over the phone or in an automated way, as proof of identity.
434.
by mandevil 2y ago
How big do you think the DB field is for these password recovery questions? Do you think that they are blobs? Having seen databases with these sorts of fields, the ones at my company were more like varchar[25] than blob.
435.
by mandevil 2y ago
My suspicion is this to rule out a specific hash. One well known to everyone interested in computer security back in the 1990's. One that haunts our nightmares to this day. Back in my day, you see, there was this hash known as NTLM, wh
436.
by mandevil 2y ago
Not technically true. Even without a formal plea, you can enter a plea of guilty and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Showing remorse and admitting your crimes definitely makes judges like you more!
437.
by mandevil 2y ago
So there are two different things here that you are conflating: the specific pardoning of Michael Flynn and whether lying to a federal agent should be a crime. Lying to a federal agent is a crime because the Government wants to make it easy
438.
by mandevil 2y ago
The size being the same was not because of design reuse, but because that's the size limits imposed by the Space Shuttle payload bay. (1) Many of the contractors were the same, but that's because they won a competitive bidding pro
439.
by mandevil 2y ago
As to the uncertainty and mysteries, you are 100% correct. One of the big failure modes for engineers in dealing with human health is the assumption that things are as simple and logical as the stuff we build, when it's simply not at a
440.
by mandevil 2y ago
As a software engineer married to a healthcare professional, I disagree strongly about the quality of the healthcare discussions here. A whole lot of the conversation is software engineers who think that they can reason from first principle
441.
by mandevil 2y ago
So, there is something to overcoming childhood adversity. Since the rise of the modern primary system for electing US Presidents most of our Presidents had traumatic childhoods(1). It seems like most of the people who want a stadium full of
442.
by mandevil 2y ago
Because Hubble was designed for in-orbit servicing by the STS, it had it's optics, CCD systems, and even the flight computers (not originally designed for in-orbit servicing!) replaced over the various servicing missions. The differenc
443.
by mandevil 2y ago
Boom Overture, which does not yet exist, is supposed to have a range of 4,250 nm (presuming they can get their engines to actually exist, which is a giant question-mark). That means they can bring JFK-FRA into service, but SFO-SIN is going
444.
by mandevil 2y ago
According to stories I heard, BA was able to turn a small profit on Concorde, but Air France never did(1). That was with each plane being given away for free (excuse me, 1 pound/franc each) subsidized by their governments. So with the
445.
by mandevil 2y ago
For bizjets, that's another good use case, thanks. I don't know how much travel there is along these routes, but you could probably shrink Dubai-Mumbai, say, from 3 hours to 1 hour, and that would be handy for meetings- only a 1.5
446.
by mandevil 2y ago
It seems unlikely that airlines are going to lead the way here, just due to economics I think it's going to be the bizjet market leading the way(1). So the obvious choice for domestic flights would be Russia: rich oligarchs, huge count
447.
by mandevil 2y ago
Eh, as long as California has things that destroy their homeowners like Prop 13 and Prop 103 people are going to be moving to Arizona from California. The key to enjoying Phoenix is understanding that from October to May or so, it's ba
448.
by mandevil 2y ago
I wrote a python script that parsed all of our back-end code, looking for every log message, and used that as the basis for a giant n-dimensional vector representing every possible log message. Then I looked at every five minute chunk of ou
449.
by mandevil 2y ago
Almost a decade ago I ran into a couple of problems where our logs started to change qualitatively on a SaaS tool I was supporting, but not in a way that printed more error level messages in logs. When someone complained about incorrect beh
450.
by mandevil 2y ago
I mean, this is all true for a war today. But the economies were not intertwined as tightly in 1925, which is when these war plans were being drawn up. The US and Canada had had a pretty nasty border dispute (at least from the losing Canadi

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