I dunno, Council announces that they are going to be talking about Flock (YC 17), that there will be public comment about Flock (YC 17), sees that a whole lot of people are very angry about Flock (YC 17) and have come to the meeting, and immediately shift the discussion to a committee so they don't have to hear those people angry about Flock (YC 17), I can see why she did what she did. That sure seems like the Council is trying to avoid all of the community anger over Flock (YC 17).
If you are going to do something that makes so many people so angry that they are willing to come to a local government meeting, you kinda have to let them talk about it, you know? Otherwise it feels like you're trying to run out the clock on them.
Can you explain the need to be annoying about the YC 17 thing? What's the objective here? Is it supposed to convince potential founders to decide against taking YC's money as a way of putting financial pressure on YC not to fund projects that people don't like? Or is the intention that YC people are reading your comment directly and it's changing their minds?
I can't imagine either of these being impactful, and the effect seems to just be to distract from people's concerns about Flock (YC 17). Eg, my eyes are bouncing off of the presumably anti-Flock statement you're making here because you've coated it in repeated parentheticals and tortured the writing so you can say "Flock" as often as possible.
I am amused that much of the HN community goes out of its way to highlight YC connections for companies- I've even seen it for Stripe (YC 09) and Dropbox (YC07) within the past year or so- but has completely dropped that for Flock.
Huh, you seem to be right, the most recent for Dropbox was about 5 years ago. Maybe my sense of time is all screwed up? I thought I remembered it more recently than that. But I trust the data more than I trust my memory.
At $previousJob we implemented circuit breakers: centralize all requests to the foreign service (every call to service theta went through the service theta client which had some shared state so everything so we could keep track of requests) and then monitor, when error % got above a certain limit start to dump requests to a text file for sending in the future instead of now. And the centralized caller will send one message every time gap (we started at 30s) and as long as that errors out we keep writing.
We did that because otherwise we would get 2x30 second timeouts to a dead service on every user interaction and it made for a terrible user experience. Keeping track and handling it smartly made the average user experience a lot better.
Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).
Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.
The ENIAC press demo, essentially the first public demo of an “electromechanical brain”, just ran parabolas to estimate artillery trajectory. (It also involved the genius addition of ping pong balls secured to each lamp on the machine, so as to be more legible to the reporters and photographers)
At very large $companyIUsedToWorkFor, the accessibility features got a lot better once we hired a blind developer. Once it went from "we have to pass this test" as our only feedback to "Bob did this because it confused his text-to-speech program when he was looking for another bug" we got such a great success flywheel going. Very quick feedback cycles really is required for successful software development.
Flock is Planet Labs name for the mega-constellation of imaging satellites made up of 3U cubesats known as Doves- hence the name for the full constellation. It has nothing to do with the automated license plate reader company.
Is it going to be streaming? On which platform? With the "HBO canceled it, wouldn't even release it to streaming" already in its history I am very unsure that it will even end up on streaming, and so decided to see it in the theater.
And I hit a Sunday matinee with my 9 year-old so it was $10.75/person, which felt worth it to me.
My kid (9yo) had seen a couple of Roadrunner cartoons on Youtube, no more than that. e.g. I don't think he's ever seen a Sylvester-Tweety cartoon. It didn't matter, he enjoyed the movie a lot. Beyond the very basics of Coyote and Roadrunner, which everyone picks up very quickly- and if you don't they do a great modern version in the opening minutes to bring you up to speed- the movie doesn't need deep knowledge of the WB cartoon universe. It's not like the MCU that way.
And the fact that it reinforced a message his mom and I have been trying to teach him (about the importance of not letting failure keep you from trying again) was a bonus for us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-cost_Uncrewed_Combat_Attac... is almost a straight copy of the infamous Iranian Shahed for ~$35,000 USD. (Perhaps the US sourced their Shahed from Ukraine, though that, like many things about this program, has not been officially discussed.)
I wonder, at the point of such a simple thing as the Saheed (there are videos online of some of its electronics, not saying it's bad, indeed it's cheap and effective, but it's dirt simple), does the USA really need to reverse engineer it? Is it just a way to prevent project management turning the thing into a million dollar per unit thing?
People calling it "reverse engineered" are not entirely correct.
The "Low accuracy, low speed, drone" concept has not changed since the V1 was invented by the Germans. Who then went ahead and built a more modern one back in the 80s. It should look very familiar:
It has all the bells and whistles you can recognize: GPS guidance, shitty small piston engine, lumbering speed, launched from a box truck using a small booster rocket.
See, the funny part is that the project was considered a failure because they were designed as anti-radar munitions, to just hang around until a radar transmitted and home in and destroy it. But that part of the project never figured out a good seeker.
It's just convergent evolution. That's what the design requirements imply.
Makes sense, I presume any defense corporation (even small ones of the drone manufacturer style) could get one of these running in a few months if needs arise.
Now, for the defense model of "western" nations (once again, not saying this is a bad thing nor wrong), a dumb warhead that just lands wherever and explodes makes no sense, no tactic would be enabled by it, so I guess the natural course of actions is you get heavier guidance requirements (case in point, radar homing), then you get operation in GPS-denied environment, then some other part of the army decides it needs to be carried on fighter jets, and another team wants it carried on frigates, and suddenly you have developed a million-€ loitering munition instead of a 10k€ V1 tactical-analogue!
Hubble was the result of an open competition between a variety of companies and technologies. But the winners were the people who built the KH-11 spy satellite, who could offer the cheapest and best proved options because of their experience with KEENAN.
Both KH-11 and Hubble had similar sized mirrors, but that wasn't because of design reuse, it was because that was the biggest primary mirror you could fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay (1). In actual fact no KH-11 went into space on a Shuttle, but the plan up until the Challenger disaster had been for the STS to carry all US satellites into space, including the KH-11, which was designed around that cargo bay.
1: The space shuttle cargo bay was sized the way it was for NRO payloads, but it seems clear that the USAF wasn't thinking about KEEENAN when they requested that size- a design like that would be better if it was wider and didn't need to be nearly as long. My suspicion is, when NASA asked them what size they wanted for the bay, they took the last design they had- the just cancelled KH-10 Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and used that.
If you are going to do something that makes so many people so angry that they are willing to come to a local government meeting, you kinda have to let them talk about it, you know? Otherwise it feels like you're trying to run out the clock on them.
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