41–50 of 257 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
[flagged]
Perhaps self-reflect.
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.
If you look at code as art, where its value is a measure of the effort it takes to make, sure.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
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.
NASA didn't build this, Lockheed Martin and their subcontractors did. Articles and headlines like this make people think that NASA does a lot more than they actually do. This is like a CEO claiming credit for everything a company does.
Lockheed Martin and their subcontractors did the implementation. We do not know how much of the high-level architecture of the system has been specified by NASA and how much by Lockheed Martin.
NASA didn't build this, Lockheed Martin and their subcontractors did. Articles and headlines like this make people think that NASA does a lot more than they actually do. This is like a CEO claiming credit for everything a company does.
Nice “well, actually”. I’m sure Lockheed were building this quad-redundant, radiation-hardened PowerPC that costs millions of dollars and communicates via Time-Triggered Ethernet anyway, whether NASA needed one or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lockheed Martin and their subcontractors did the implementation. We do not know how much of the high-level architecture of the system has been specified by NASA and how much by Lockheed Martin.
I do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thir…
Google then had complete regret not doing this with ECC RAM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206811
Their redundancy architecture is interesting. I'd be curious of what innovations went into rad-hard fabrication, too. Sandia Secure Processor (aka Score) was a neat example of rad-hard, secure processors.
Their simulation systems might be helpful for others, too. We've seen more interest in that from FoundationDB to TigerBeetle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Le…
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?
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
...
}
```
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.