| ▲ | dmk 6 hours ago |
| The quote from the CMU guy about modern Agile and DevOps approaches challenging architectural discipline is a nice way of saying most of us have completely forgotten how to build deterministic systems. Time-triggered Ethernet with strict frame scheduling feels like it's from a parallel universe compared to how we ship software now. |
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| ▲ | carefree-bob 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| During the time of the first Apollo missions, a dominant portion of computing research was funded by the defense department and related arms of government, making this type of deterministic and WCET (worst case execution time) a dominant computing paradigm. Now that we have a huge free market for things like online shopping and social media, this is a bit of a neglected field and suffers from poor investment and mindshare, but I think it's still a fascinating field with some really interesting algorithms -- check out the work of Frank Mueller or Johann Blieberger. |
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| ▲ | therobots927 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Contrary to propaganda from the likes of Ludwig von Mises, the free market is not some kind of optimal solution to all of our problems. And it certainly does not produce excellent software. |
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| ▲ | iknowstuff 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Tesla’s Cybertruck uses that in its ethernet as well! |
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| ▲ | carefree-bob an hour ago | parent [-] | | All the ADAS automotive systems use this, there are several startups in this space as well, such as Ethernovia. |
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| ▲ | dyauspitr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Agile is not meant to make solid, robust products. It’s so you can make product fragments/iterations quickly, with okay quality and out to the customer asap to maximize profits. |
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| ▲ | nickff 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | “Agile” doesn’t mean that you release the first iteration, it’s just a methodology that emphasizes short iteration loops. You can definitely develop reliable real-time systems with Agile. | | |
| ▲ | kermatt an hour ago | parent [-] | | > “Agile” doesn’t mean that you release the first iteration Someone needs to inform the management of the last three companies I worked for about this. |
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| ▲ | buster an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You hopefully know thats not true. But it's a matter of quality goals. Need absolute robustness? Prioritize it and build it. Need speed and be first to market? Prioritize and build it.
You can do both in an agile way. Many would argue that you won't be as fast in a non-agile way. There is no bullet point in the agile manifest saying to build unreliable software. | |
| ▲ | froddd 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The manifesto refers to “working software”. It does not say anything about “okay quality”. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As 70's child that was there when the whole agile took over, and systems engineer got rebranded as devops, I fully agree with them. Add TDD, XP and mob programming as well. While in some ways better than pure waterfall, most companies never adopted them fully, while in some scenarios they are more fit to a Silicon Valley TV show than anything else. |
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| ▲ | arduanika 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You could even say that part of the value of Artemis is that we're remembering how to do some very hard things, including the software side. This is something that you can't fake. In a world where one of the more plausible threats of AI is the atrophy of real human skills -- the goose that lays the golden eggs that trains the models -- this is a software feat where I'd claim you couldn't rely on vibe code, at least not fully. That alone is worth my tax dollars. |
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| ▲ | mvkel 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you look at code as art, where its value is a measure of the effort it takes to make, sure. |
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| ▲ | stodor89 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Or if you're building something important, like a spaceship. | |
| ▲ | BobbyTables2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In that case, our test infrastructure belongs in the Louvre… | |
| ▲ | couchand 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If your implication is that stencil art does not take effort then perhaps you may not fully appreciate Banksy. Works like Gaza Kitty or Flower Thrower don’t just appear haphazardly without effort. |
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| ▲ | vasco 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's not like the approach they took is any different. Just slapped 8x the number of computers on it for calculating the same thing and wait to see if they disagree. Not the pinnacle of engineering. The equivalent of throwing money at the problem. |
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| ▲ | curiousObject 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | >Just slapped 8x the number of computers on it ‘Just’ is not an appropriate word in this context. Much of the article is about the difficulty of synchronization, recovery from faults, and about the redundant backup and recovery systems | |
| ▲ | MikeTheGreat an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | What happens when they don't? | | |
| ▲ | vasco an hour ago | parent [-] | | If you have a point to make, make it. | | |
| ▲ | MikeTheGreat 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | What my question is hinting at is that there's actually some really interesting engineering around resolving what happens when the systems disagree. Things like Paxos and Raft help make this much more tractable for mere mortals (like myself); the logic and reasoning behind them are cool and interesting. |
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| ▲ | tayk47999 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [dead] |
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| ▲ | ramraj07 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I take the opposite message from that line - out of touch teams working on something so over budget and so overdue, and so bureaucratic, and with such an insanely poor history of success, and they talk as if they have cured cancer. This is the equivalent of Altavista touting how amazing their custom server racks are when Google just starts up on a rack of naked motherboards and eats their lunch and then the world. Lets at least wait till the capsule comes back safely before touting how much better they are than "DevOps" teams running websites, apparently a comparison that's somehow relevant here to stoke egos. |
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| ▲ | danhon 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You mean like this? "With limited funds, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin initially deployed this system of inexpensive, interconnected PCs to process many thousands of search requests per second from Google users. This hardware system reflected the Google search algorithm itself, which is based on tolerating
multiple computer failures and optimizing around them. This production server was one of about thirty such racks in the first Google data center. Even though many of the installed PCs never worked and were difficult to repair, these racks provided Google with its first large-scale computing system and allowed the company to grow quickly and at minimal cost." https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-computer-the-google... | | |
| ▲ | 1970-01-01 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Google then had complete regret not doing this with ECC RAM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206811 | | |
| ▲ | newmana 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A great version of this and how ex-DEC engineers saved Google and their choice of ECC RAM - inventing MapReduce and BigTable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK0I4f8Rbis | |
| ▲ | ramraj07 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It got them to where they need to be to then worry about ECC. This is like the dudes who deploy their blog on kubernetes just in case it hits front page of new york times or something. |
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| ▲ | ramraj07 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The problem they solved isn't easy. But its not some insane technical breakthrough either. Literally add redundancy, thats the ask. They didnt invent quantum computing to solve the issue did they? Why dunk on sprints? | | |
| ▲ | vlovich123 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wow. What a hand wave away of the intrinsic challenge of writing fault tolerant distributed systems. It only seems easy because of decades of research and tools built since Google did it, but by no means was it something you could trivially add to a project as you can today. | | |
| ▲ | tempest_ 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > fault tolerant distributed systems I mean there were mainframes which could be described as that. IBM just fixed it in hardware instead of software so its not like it was an unknown field. | | |
| ▲ | vlovich123 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Even if that were actually true (it’s not in important ways) Google showed you could do this cheaply in software instead of expensive in hardware. You’re still hand waving away things like inventing a way to make map/reduce fault tolerant and automatic partitioning of data and automatic scheduling which didn’t exist before and made map/reduce accessible - mainframes weren’t doing this. They pioneered how you durably store data on a bunch of commodity hardware through GFS - others were not doing this. And they showed how to do distributed systems at a scale not seen before because the field had bottlenecked on however big you could make a mainframe. |
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| ▲ | bluegatty 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, space is just hard. Everything is bespoke. You need 10x cost to get every extra '9' in reliability and manned flight needs a lot of nines. People died on the Apollo missions. It just costs that much. | | |
| ▲ | arduanika 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Please, this is hacker news. Nothing else is hard outside of our generic software jobs, and we could totally solve any other industry in an afternoon. | | |
| ▲ | geerlingguy 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mean I can just replace Dropbox with a shell script. | | |
| ▲ | bluegatty 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's funny because you could! Dropbox started a shell script :) Funny though I would assume HN people would respect how hard real-time stuff and 'hardened' stuff is. | | |
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| ▲ | ramraj07 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yep, spend 100 billion on what should have cost 1/50that cost, and send people up to the moon with rockets that we are still keeping our fingers crossed wont kill them tomorrow, and we have to congratulate them for dunking on some irrelevant career? |
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| ▲ | bfung 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One simply does not [“provision” more hardware|(reboot systems)|(redeploy software)] in space. | |
| ▲ | therobots927 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Modern software development is a fucking joke. I’m sorry if that offends you. Somehow despite Moore’s law, the industry has figured out how to actually regress on quality. | |
| ▲ | HNisCIS 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What would you suggest? Vibe coding a react app that runs on a Mac mini to control trajectory? What happens when that Mac mini gets hit with an SEU or even a SEGR? Guess everyone just dies? | | |
| ▲ | mlsu 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, of course not! It would be far better to have an openClaw instance running on a Mac Mini. We would only need to vibe code a 15s cron job for assistant prompting... USER: You are a HELPFUL ASSISTANT. You are a brilliant robot. You are a lunar orbiter flight computer. Your job is to calculate burn times and attitudes for a critical mission to orbit the moon. You never make a mistake. You are an EXPERT at calculating orbital trajectories and have a Jack Parsons level knowledge of rocket fuel and engines. You are a staff level engineer at SpaceX. You are incredible and brilliant and have a Stanley Kubrick level attention to detail. You will be fired if you make a mistake. Many people will DIE if you make any mistakes. USER: Your job is to calculate the throttle for each of the 24 orientation thrusters of the spacecraft. The thrusters burn a hypergolic monopropellent and can provide up to 0.44kN of thrust with a 2.2 kN/s slew rate and an 8ms minimum burn time. Format your answer as JSON, like so: ```json
{
x1: 0.18423
x2: 0.43251
x3: 0.00131
...
}
```
one value for each of the 24 independent monopropellant attitude thrusters on the spacecraft, x1, x2, x3, x4, y1, y2, y3, y4, z1, z2, z3, z4, u1, u2, u3, u4, v1, v2, v3, v4, w1, w2, w3, w4. You may reference the collection of markdown files stored in `/home/user/geoff/stuff/SPACECRAFT_GEOMETRY` to inform your analysis.USER: Please provide the next 15 seconds of spacecraft thruster data to the USER. A puppy will be killed if you make a mistake so make sure the attitude is really good. ONLY respond in JSON. | |
| ▲ | ramraj07 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | All Im suggesting is to be humble about your mediocre solutions. This is not the only solution and not that ingenious necessarily. Why do you need to bring up vibecoding here? Because people who criticize arrogant nasal engineers are also AI idiots by default? | | |
| ▲ | ToucanLoucan 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wild shit to be advising other people to be humble whilst talking directly out of your ass about technology you clearly do not understand and engineers you have no respect for. Perhaps self-reflect. |
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| ▲ | simoncion 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > ...they talk as if they have cured cancer. I'd chalk that up to the author of the article writing for a relatively nontechnical audience and asking for quotes at that level. |
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