Live data from Hacker News

Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

nco.ncep.noaa.gov

221–230 of 236 posts

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perfect sense So you just inherently believe all that is reported as fact? Remember when the Gulf of Tonkin incident was “for real really real” and we invaded Vietnam? Or the WMDs in Iraq? I’m not tinfoil hatting - Just calling out how interesting it is 3 major events in a documented as fragile industry happen so close. That’s literally all I mentioned in my orig comment.

> Remember when the Gulf of Tonkin incident was “for real really real” and we invaded Vietnam? Well, no, the US military was (openly) in Vietnam in support of South Vietnam long before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Heck, the US military was there (again overtly) in support of France for several years before South Vietnam existed as such. And, ironically, they were there in support of the Viet Minh – which later became…

My point was that the Tonkin incident was reported incorrectly and did not match fact; as we found out some decades later.

Tying that to this thread: why is what’s reported about the airlines taken to be fact? (And I’m not speaking as if I mean this is malicious (as the Tonkin incident was) - just reported incorrect from fact for other “capital friendly” (face saving) reasons.)

Didn’t someone say “believe half of what you read…” somewhere?

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm just waiting for the country to collapse under bureaucracy.

View it from the other side: even with this much dysfunction, things work most of the time and when they fail they are recoverable. There's no motivation to improve until something fails hard enough. If no one crashes as a result of this METAR outage, I predict nothing will change.

Define “work” if you don’t mind. There’s currently a power play going on about the national debt, wealth inequality is bad and getting worse, tax money gets wasted like it’s going out of style, social security isn’t and has never been solvent, the bigger government gets the more abstracted away from real people it becomes, and we all just stick our heads in the sand and ignore it because there is nothing the common person can do to effect change. Don’t tell me “go vote” because I do and it does fuck all nothing to change anything.

People adapt and say “meh it’s working well enough” because they don’t have a sane alternative.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#223
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used METAR for running, or rather to say which days I'm allowed to not run. I noticed that when the day was long, and I was feeling tired and lazy it was a lot easier to find some excuse why not to run that day. This excuse was often the weather. But on the other hand I didn't want to say no matter the weather I must run, because that is obviously excessive. So I made up a simple "algorithm" to decide if the weathe…

Cool idea, what's your algorithm's decision criteria?

I think it was something super simple. Like temperature above X, no percipitation at the moment, no percipitation predicted during the next hour.

(I also remember I was willing to skip running in case of anything “exciting” being reported. Like tornados, or sandstorms or vulcanic ash. Not that any of that was a real possibility.)

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever you think of her actions, her journey (and similar for a variety of other anti-Trump Republicans) illustrates the power a President can have over Congress. This has pretty clear implications for the budget process.

Trump was not President at the time of the Liz Cheney leadership controversy, that was after he was out of office. Trump is not President anymore and no one should pretend that he is.

Correct. I guess the lines are blurry for those that let Trump live rent free in their brain. Everything is Trump, even when it isn't. The PsyOp really worked.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#226
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NOTAM system was apparently running on old SPARC hardware so I’d easily believe that they haven’t been given enough budget to hire engineers and are basically keeping the lights on. One peril of the government funding model is that it’s effective at shoveling money to contracting companies but not having skilled oversight, so you tend to see lots of big projects which founder under their own weight.

SPARC gear would last that long though, I recall playing with a T1 system and opening the chassis to watch the Christmas tree of self check lights on every part of the board turn on. The entire system was designed to self check every component down to like, individual VRMs.

Yeah, that's both good and bad — it's great that it's reliable but that's also the kind of thing I could see people getting complacent about because, hey, it hasn't failed before.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#227

METARs are perpetually down. one funny thing about them, they are deemed to be a critical service which requires something like 99.99% uptime to be in compliance with the FAA regulations governing service delivery. to get around this, a METAR is considered up as long as it has power, regardless as to whether it itsproducing data or providing accurate readings. the technology was certified and frozen in the 90s. many…

The flip side is that the military also relies on and distributes observations. Last I looked, the FMQ-19 used a windows server 2019 box. And it is used for some of the airports that are dual use, such as Hickam/Honolulu international.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#228
post #227

METARs are perpetually down. one funny thing about them, they are deemed to be a critical service which requires something like 99.99% uptime to be in compliance with the FAA regulations governing service delivery. to get around this, a METAR is considered up as long as it has power, regardless as to whether it itsproducing data or providing accurate readings. the technology was certified and frozen in the 90s. many…

The flip side is that the military also relies on and distributes observations. Last I looked, the FMQ-19 used a windows server 2019 box. And it is used for some of the airports that are dual use, such as Hickam/Honolulu international.

how much does one of those cost?

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sure, my nature distrusts what a corporation says because it’s always filtered through stockholder functions OK, but in Southwest's case, you had former and current employees from various positions within the company publicly coming out and lambasting Southwest for the failure to actually invest in upgrading their scheduling system that led to the outage. It wasn't just a corporation coming out and going, "Here's wh…

> invest in upgrading Meaning - a system is so old, slow, bug, and vulnerability prone a bad actor can pen-test around and mess stuff up?

"Can"? Sure, just like most systems. "Did"? No, that's ignoring the fundamentals of how the system crashed. I'd recommend doing a deeper dive into what actually happened.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed?

You need me to Google Medicare budget and defense budget for you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States) >In 2020, US federal government spending on Medicare was $776.2 billion.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De... >Annual budget US$721.5 billion (FY2020)[2] Hopefully, I won't need a citation that $776 > $721

It's much worse than that. Defense budget is hidden by breaking it down to many many different divisions. "Homeland Security" is defense with massive budget but it's separate from Pentagon, DoD, etc.

Anyone think the NSA budget for "defense" is included in Pentagon, DoD, Homeland Security?

Anyone think the trillion dollars in weapons being sent to Ukraine for our proxy war with Russia is in any visible budget?

Medicare meanwhile cannot hide all the spending, it's right there, even the fraud in the system is visible in the spending. But defense spending hides twice maybe even three times the spending.

Post reply on HN