skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They want to carry 100 people. An escape system for those many people is the same scale of a commercial airliner escape system, which is designed to be operated on a stationary plane, on land or water. Astronauts will be well trained to use it but I think that there must be a lot of openings to let 100 people get out quickly in mid air. Maybe they'll agree that Starship is its own escape system.

There is a section about Space Shuttle's crew bailout at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes

Before the "Ejection escape systems" there are a few paragraphs about "inflight crew escape system"

> The vehicle was put in a stable glide on autopilot, the hatch was blown, and the crew slid out a pole to clear the orbiter's left wing. They would then parachute to earth or the sea

But 100 people is a different matter IMHO.

Ejections seats and capsule were not pursued, the Wikipedia page explains the reasons.
You're right about how machine learning is learning to approximate a function - most machine learning systems are mathematically equivalent to stochastic gradient descent, a statistical method which can, theoretically, do the same thing.

The surprise was that people (me, at least!) thought the computation and amount of data required to learn a function like "translate English to French" would be completely impractical to ever realize.

I think it's open question whether humans work like that, though we probably do.
Go play some KSP, you’ll learn to appreciate not blowing up on the pad.
Some Tesla events have been shown to have artificially-inserted cheers to show more enthusiasm than the crowd actually had. I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing that for SpaceX, too, but I also wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX launches had a lot of enthusiastic people in whatever crowd watched them. It was pretty telling that we didn't hear the roar of the engines on the "cheering" track, which would have happened for pretty much every recording of people actually watching the launch.
Wait did that happen with the USSR!?! Could you provide more info?
No spacecraft (except the ISS) has a post-launch escape vehicle. Lunar Starship isn't really in-scope for a launch escape system.
During the 19th century there was an attempt to establish a silk industry in New England. The industry failed, but the White Mulberry (morus alba), imported to serve as the food source for the silkworms, is thriving in North America. It's invasive in many areas and has displaced the native mulberry, morus rubra.
They're always on time.
It's important to keep in mind that while the combination of drugs+psychotherapy works better than either alone on average across a population, this doesn't mean that everyone should be pursuing both. Some people do not respond (or even respond negatively) to psychotherapy, just like with drug therapy. Psychotherapy as an industry also has some pretty serious problems with professional and scientific standards that tend to get swept under the rug because so many people lean into psychotherapy triumphalism (e.g. declaring that drugs are only good for enabling psychotherapy, or that everyone should be seeing a therapist).
I think it's a matter of failing in a safe environment. Clearly that's what space x is doing. They fail spectularly, but they do so within the confines of a safe environment.

For the real launch they've already mapped out the failure modes and are able to prevent them when it really matters.
Do you think that is fundamentally different with, say, Boeing or SpaceX?

If you look through all the failures and close calls in aerospace they are often rooted in human psychological errors. The pressures that lead to them may change with different organizations, but they don't go away.
I agree with everything in your comment. One thing I've wondered about re space exploration though is how we reconcile what I think is pretty much universal acknowledgement that we have to do everything possible to avoid loss of life with the inherent danger of space travel, and the "drag" that a zero-tolerance safety focus can have on culture.

Put another way, what would global exploration have looked like if sailors refused to accept the risks of early ocean crossings?
Isn't the author one of the earliest prognosticators to declare "the year of Linux on the desktop" several decades ago?

Obviously still livin' the dream.
As others mentioned the hit pieces will come anyway. The success that SpaceX has had so far very clearly shows that aiming high and embracing failure is the best way to develop rockets.
Remember, the PC way to burn trash is to call it a “micro biomass power plant”.
I wonder how many folks have looked at the other details of Starship.

One I find most impressive?

Weight of Starship when fueled: 11 million pounds
Some things are transparent.

The SLS has spent 23.8 billion in nominal dollars so far. SpaceX has received about 9.8 Billion total investment, which puts an upper limit on operating losses.
I am a bit surprised about the number of 'unknowns' in the data for my mother toungue (Dutch) [1]. Are these still open questions with respect to the Dutch language or is it simply that no expert on Dutch grammar has been asked to contribute.

[1] https://grambank.clld.org/languages/dutc1256
Conquest was legal until the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawed it in 1928, so yes /s
Maybe it will take down a lot of Reddit traffic as well.
What's curious is that it's seen as a standard method of gaining traction for your website but Reddit, at least, now "strongly discourages" using alts in this manner.
Shouldn't the same logic then apply to people? Yeah, figured as much.

If you can ruin a person's entire life over a "mistake", you can definitely do the same to a company, or even better, to the decision makers at that company. Doing anything else just encourages continued bad behavior. No speculation, we have decades of observational data showing that companies and executives will do pretty much anything for a buck, legal or not.
They meant "will have worked out enough of the kinks by their 5th successful launch so as to be operating at a high success rate."

Lots of falcons failed, but you don't see anybody worried about their payload or crew on Falcon 9 these days.
> And what really sets you apart, is your reliability. You never let me down or give me any trouble. You always do exactly what I tell you to do, without any fuss or drama (...)

I've had so many issues with builds failing when the number of jobs increases, random shit breaking between versions of make, issues with timestamps causing false positives for reconfiguration, and so on - it's really not reliable at all when doing big builds on modern systems where you care about caching, distribution, and parallelism.
Super cool article, thank you. These 2 guys significantly changed the world and we don't know who they are.
Because payments are a hassle.

I thought it was a hoot when I was making a paid API about 10 years ago and there were zillions of API gateway products out there that solved all sorts of problems I didn't care about but none of them solved the one critical problem of an API business which is "take payments for API calls". Quite literally you do not have a business if you don't have that, everything else like documentation generators is optional.
The notion that taking away legal guns from legal gun owners will somehow reduce illegal violence is about as absurd as outlawing drugs.
People who want to do illegal drugs have had zero problems acquiring them, despite near infinite resources plowed into stopping them by governments at all levels.

Most people gleefully chant "The war on drugs has failed"...yet, "The war on guns" will somehow succeed?
Imagine how magnificent it would have been if they managed stage separation after doing a 360 cartwheel, via some sick on-the-fly manual intervention. I was half hoping for it.
Huh, I frequently see advice online that says to use VPNs based in countries that are not one of the "fourteen eyes"/"five eyes".
Ditto raises $45M to help companies keep their data in sync
> It almost blew up on the launchpad (see the debris flying after a few seconds)

you have literally no idea what you're talking about
What evidence do you have it almost blew up at launchpad? That most likely was concrete chunks flying off away from the rocket and nothing with the rocket itself. You really don't seem to have a grasp what was trying to be done or how any of the previous SpaceX rocket programs functioned.
That would be better, but how would you even do that for long form content, which is typical of blogs?

This idea also goes against the "Copies cite the original." approach mentioned in the article. You'd lose view/readership tracking or fragment it.
This view conflates syndication with advertising. Syndicating the content means publishing the content elsewhere, not just a link to it.
Not really. There have been a lot of proposals, but it's not possible to do without tradeoffs (Zooko's Triangle). And in practice, most of the proposed alternatives are worse — not only do they not provide one or more of the desired features, they are also unacceptably complex, fragile, or resource-intensive.
> China is not a single entity.

However it acts like one much more so than many other countries, and especially under Xi jinping.

See also https://archive.is/ZoShw (NY Times Who Owns Huawei? The Company Tried to Explain. It Got Complicated. 2019)
To be fair I trust AT&T about the same (not very much) the difference is that for me (a US citizen) one is local and the other is foreign.

Wouldn’t put it past most large telcos to do a little targeted spying.
Not if your readme also has to work on "not Github" like npm or pypi, or anything that repackages your release while using your readme.md as page content. Those images are going to have to be fully qualified URLs.
Your intel example doesn't fully hold water. Chip design has taken a binning approach for decades at this point. The silicon is designed for failure in such a way that yield is maximized assuming there will be a variance in quality. Launch and iterate happens for silicon just like anything else. During the initial product launch, there is a lot of waste, but as processes are improved, microcode updated, rework procedures defined, and value engineering efforts completed, yields go up and costs go down.
True. On the other hand, we do know that SpaceX has taken about $10 billion in funding since its inception.

With that, they developed Falcon 1, Merlin engines, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, first full-flow staged combustion engine in the methalox Raptor engine, Starship, Starship Heavy, Dragon, Crew Dragon, Re-usability, Starlink satellite manufacturing and 4,000 satellites launched to orbit, and quite a bit more.
(Low Quality Comment Here) I, for one, have never had a tumble in KSP. Nope, every single launch, exactly as planned, all the way to orbit, and even the Mun. I have never once strapped a bazzilion first-stage engines in a row just to see what happens. Never once stacked them as high as I can. Nope - totally responsible game player over here.

Note: Trying to fly Jeb directly into the Sun was a real lesson in Angular Momentum.
Look at how you'd do it in f#, ocaml, or elm first imo. The type systems of those languages allow for a very tight approach with no confounding factors. The way rust does it is the same, but with more details leaked in from the constraints rust imposes. Which is fine, but I think it's valuable to see the "pure" stripped back form in a language almost perfectly suited to it first.
I'm not sure the N1 actually killed anyone? The second launch resulted in the rocket falling on and destroying the launch pad (one engine exploded on liftoff, the computer turned most of the other engines off), but I don't think anyone died.
Yeah, mine too, but I just logged into my home server via SSH and I can see this site through the SOCKS proxy.
It's not going to hold 100 people anytime soon.

Airliners don't have an in-flight escape system, anyways.
>> It looks like the stages failed to separate and it started to spin.

Most complicated part of building any rocket by far and Starship's is a lot more complex than any previous one by far. It was always the most failure prone part but everything else looks great.
> You can actually see this in SpaceX. In development when stakes are relatively low (e.g., no payload or passengers), the risk threshold is high. But they start taking a more measured approach when that risk starts to ratchet up. The danger being, advocates of one approach don't always know when/how to transition to the other.

This corroborates "fail fast". They achieve reliability and safety by launching far more than traditional space companies and seeing failure in those launches. They prove it out before adding the risk of human lives or expensive cargo. Meanwhile traditional companies will develop their rocket for 15 years till it's "perfect". SpaceX figured out that achieving perfection is best done through actual attempts, not laboratory experiments.
Does anyone have a Nord vs Mullvad on speed of servers in the USA.

I’m ending out my Nord and want to switch, but man, I’m actually surprised at how fast Nord’s servers are, I can get 500mbps on non-peak times.
The US is many different states. If you think California and Kentucky are the same, I invite you to visit.
Evaluating the reliability of every component is extremely expensive. If you had perfect knowledge of the reliability of every component, then sure. It would be cheaper to build a perfect rocket first, then launch it. The cost saving comes because it’s cheaper to launch the rocket and see where it fails than it is to exhaustively evaluate the reliability of every component.
I'm interested! I wish I knew about your site before it went down. I run a seedbox, and I've been on the hunt for popular-but-legal torrents to support. I'd be more than happy to take a swing at running your site, if only to be a user myself.

Feel free to reach out if you're genuinely interested in passing on the torch:

torrents@cosmo.red
The production of a judgement according to criteria defining medicinal is not required for the substance to benefit people. This is a case where a meaningful emotional bond was built on top of a situation which would have been a lingering conflict—or so it seems—and this bond remains and has lasting benefits to the couple involved.
Calories in, calories out is completely accurate and ironclad as an observation or description of obesity. No doubt some cases of obesity can be solved with reducing calories in (eating less) or increasing calories out (more activity). Indeed, we have existence proofs, because there are people who beat obesity in this way.

Unfortunately, it seems like many cases of obesity - perhaps the vast majority, though we don’t know for sure - are not as amenable to these solutions.

If you reduce calories in by eating less, the body often compensates by reducing energy out (lethargy), quite happily reducing energy levels below what’s needed in the modern era e.g. to continue to go to work.

If you try to increase calories out by exercising, the body often compensates by taking that energy from your base metabolic rate, reducing energy expenditure on other things like body maintenance (getting sick, being in pain) or brain expenditure (causing brain fog).

And perhaps most pernicious of all, the mechanism for both (decreasing calories in, increasing calories out) is exertion of willpower, which is a biological process that happens in the brain and as such the body can influence that process (often with hormones), decreasing your willpower and robbing you of the ability to will yourself to eat less or exercise more.

We shouldn’t be surprised at this, either. Obesity is not a pleasant condition and almost every obese person would be thin if it was an easy choice to make. Yet we have an epidemic of obesity that has proven very difficult to fix, so we should suspect that something more than simple choice is going on here.
I'm really interested to see the hole it dug under the launch mount. The NASA SpaceFlight van took a direct hit from a fast moving chunk of concrete.

https://twitter.com/JerryPikePhoto/status/164905272269878477...

https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1649053476276797440

Edit: it really did dig a crater (this was flat concrete under the pad before):

https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1649062784167030785
Iceland and the Scandinavian countries have, let's say, "weather-related" reasons for their depressions. They are introvert societies with the highest percentage of single-person households.

The reason for the US being close to them could be the high prescription culture and the social aggression inherent in everyday US life, masked behind curteous words, customer-oriented interaction and polished looks.
When is the next attempt? Days, weeks, months?
The bad news is, the situation is probably not heading anywhere good. Firstly, there is a "mafia" at this company. I don't mean it in a negative way, there is always a "mafia." The problem is, you're not in it. The second problem is, they are proceeding in ignorance. The probability they will encounter disaster is significant and there's no reason to think they wouldn't throw you under the bus. Be careful.

The good news is twofold.

"I feel like I played my hand wrong."

Firstly, there's not a lot you could have done, outside of Machiavellian maneuvering. The current situation is mostly the results of choices other people made.

Secondly, it sounds like you've built up your resume there and you're ready to leave. I'd recommend you let go of the past and start thinking about your future and what other opportunities you'd like to pursue.
Only in old fields with a long history of failures to learn from are engineers expected to be failure-free. You're absolutely right that civil or structural engineers should not be expected to build a few bridges or houses and hope that eventually they come up with a design that doesn't fall down anymore.

Starship is far outside the realm of rote engineering codes that just need to be faithfully executed. They've simulated and tested and validated as much as was reasonable, now they're working with and learning from full-scale prototypes. If it just worked, they wouldn't know how much margin they had. Now that it's exploded, they know a large number of components that were good enough for the phases of flight that it went through, and also the exact stress at which a particular component/system failed: that's incredibly valuable and useful information, and not something you can find on Stack Overflow or an ISO standard.
I would think that CCP just forces them to penalize certain things (and maybe promote other things) and in the west they merely don't do that (both for engagement and to avoid getting canceled for censoring certain topics).

Compared to other social media it doesn't seem that "debauchery and stupidity" is more prominent there.
Electric Vehicle Tax Credit Rules Create ‘Chaos for Consumers’
I strongly suspect the range safety officer pulled the trigger. It did a bunch of unexpected tumbles, so I think if it were flight termination system, that would have popped it earlier. I don't think it came apart of its own account, the RUD was quite rapid.
100% success matters when you need to hit a launch window for interplanetary transit. or when you have spacecraft that are integrating sensors from dozens of commercial and academic partners. 100% success matters when rockets are actually launching payloads. what is the evidence that this fail fast method is superior to the already tried and tested method? everyone just assumes that. the differences between spx starship and SLS go far beyond just that method anyway so you cannot possibly compare
Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
There were pdp-11s everywhere in the 1970s, and the designs were published (I have the schematics in my desk drawer here on microfiche). They were built from off the shelf TTL chips...

> All the stories about "campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers" etc is theater.

The stories might be true, but not so much about acquiring the designs as quality implementations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_So...:

> Soviet industry was unable to mass-produce computers to acceptable quality standards[6] and locally manufactured copies of Western hardware were unreliable.[7] As personal computers spread to industries and offices in the West, the Soviet Union's technological lag increased.[8]

> ...

> Since computers were considered strategic goods by the United States, their sale by Western countries was generally not allowed without special permission.[39] As a result of the CoCom embargo, companies from Western Bloc countries could not export computers to the Soviet Union (or service them) without a special license.[84]
We are talking about kids. They will want what you teach them to want.

With parents working insane hours in the US and outsourcing the socialisation and education of kids to electronics and corporations with perverse incentives, with local communities practically gone in an urban lifestyle, we are raising generations of porn addicted dopamine junkies. The west is fucked.
I think your opinion might be overly influenced by your disdain for Musk. This sounds borderline unhinged to me.

> It's how a 9-to-5 employee thinks about capital

Okay, well, I'm the founder and CTO of a Series C company.

> you suddenly owe us MILLIONS to use our API

Where did you get this price? Regardless "MILLIONS" is not even something you need C-suite approval for at Microsoft.

> in order to provide a free service to your customers

The service is not free.
That's literally not true. I could file taxes with no itemized deductions and the IRS would happily take my overly large payment.
SpinLaunch is pretty interesting too - throwing ships into space
https://www.spinlaunch.com/
And twice the thrust
Enshittification [0]

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
People seem to have forgotten (or simply have no clue) how all the previous SpaceX projects worked. Also seem to be ignoring the fact they are by far the most successful launch company today so I think they know what they are doing.
I agree with what you're saying, but can't resist this little niggle...

> it's easier and more fun to trim the sails than build the rest of the ship.

That depends on the personality of the dev. Some devs consider the main body of the ship to be the easier and more fun thing. (I suspect that how fun a task is is correlated with how easy it feels to do).
The question is how to keep kids off social media. I am very thankful neighbor mom, who bought her son a smart watch and not a cheap android phone. Good example for other kids. It’s clear, that departments with lots of clever people are doing to lock young kids in the phones. And only parents can protect them.
Pretty sure they terminated it when the separation phase didn’t go as planned.
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