| ▲ | ramraj07 6 hours ago |
| 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 6 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... |
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| ▲ | 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 43 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. |
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| ▲ | 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. |
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| ▲ | 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. |
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| ▲ | 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? |
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| ▲ | 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. |
