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The device the parent is describing has a long history, and they're known as 'zip guns'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm

Yes and the response is telling you that you can build something orders of magnitude more sophisticated without any trouble. The point is, the firearm is not the tube the projectile comes out of. Firearm is closely defined and not intuitive to the general public.

From Carlito's Way:

> Out come the zip guns. Homemade gun. You pull the hook back, catch that bullet square, ping. Hit you in the head, man, you got serious problems.


Quite a page. Featuring the work of ted k and a toy pop-gun that's un-toyed

‘Real’ means inflation-adjusted.

I think Gmail doesn’t want you to use their service for sending email; they want you to have to advertise ‘with’ them.

I have been thinking about this issue for a similar length of time as the article author, but for the reasons you describe think the seasons should be slightly offset from the solstices (as opposed to centered on them). My current thinking is that summer should run from one month before the summer solstice to two months after, and so forth.

No its not quite right still, I think for the US it still makes the most sense to have the start of the summer be the longest day, because basically the earth has been heating up to that point and that’s when the energy input begins to wane. Think about it like a steak: when you take it off the grill, its still heating up a bit before it starts to cool down.

Your post is frustrating to read because of the incorrect spelling and grammar; these errors make it hard to take you seriously.

>""The war in Iran" should be called for what it is:

>"Its "trumps war", nothing else. Hes the solely to blaim. Israel would never had started it on their own.

>"The kicker? MAGA voted for "the no wars president", and so far hes started FIVE."

Could be:

"The war in Iran" should be called what it is:

It's 'Trump's War', and nothing else. He's solely to blame. Israel would not have started it on their own.

The kicker is that MAGA voted for the 'no-war' president, and so far, he's started five.

Note that in addition to spelling and grammar, I switched "FIVE" to lower-case italics (which are reverted to regular because the block is italicized), as capitalizing for emphasis is against the HN guidelines.


nice bot account you have there.

“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.

> “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.


Management understand it less than anyone else does.

I would differentiate between iterative development and incremental development.

Incremental development is like panting a picture line by line like a printer where you add new pieces to the final result without affecting old pieces.

Iterative is where you do the big brush strokes first and then add more and more detail dependent on what to learn from each previous brush strokes. You can also stop at any time when you think that the final result is good enough.

If you are making a new type of system and don’t know what issues will come up and what customers will value (highly complex environment) iterative is the thing to do.

But if you have a very predictable environment and you are implementing a standard or a very well specified system (van be highly complicated yet not very complex), you might as will do incremental development.

Roughly speaking though as there is of course no perfect specification which is not the final implementation so there are always learnings so there is always some iterative parts of it.


A physicist who worked on radiation-tolerant electronics here. Apart from the short iteration loops, agile also means that the SW/HW requirements are not fully defined during the first iterations, because they may also evolve over time. But this cannot be applied to projects where radiation/fault tolerance is the top priority. Most of the time, the requirements are 100% defined ahead of time, leading to a waterfall-like or a mixed one, where the development is still agile but the requirements are never discussed again, except in negligible terms.

I think people mean so many different things when talking about agile. I'm pretty sure a small team of experts is a good fit for critical systems.

A fixed amount of meetings every day/week/month to appease management and rushing to pile features into buggy software will do more harm than good.


SCRUM methodology absolutely prioritizes a "Potentially Shippable Product Increment" as the output of every sprint.

It does but this is the idea that I think one has to bend or ignore the most since people always bend or ignore bits of agile.

i.e. being able to print "Hello World" and not crash might make something shippable but you wouldn't actually do it.

I think the right amount of "bend" of the concept is to try to keep the product in a testable state as much as possible and even if you're not doing TDD it's good to have some tests before the very end of a big feature. It's also productive to have reviews before completing. So there's value in checking something in even before a user can see any change.

If you don't do this then you end up with huge stories because you're trying to make a user-visible change in every sprint and that can be impossible to do.


The motorized hood ornaments on Rolls Royce vehicles were a solution to the problem of people being injured by, or stealing the (Spirit of Ecstasy) ornaments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ecstasy


How does it being motorized prevent injury?

> Today's Spirit of Ecstasy, from the 2003 Phantom model onward, stands at 3 inches (7.6 cm) and, for the safety of any person being accidentally hit, is mounted on a spring-loaded mechanism designed to retract instantly into the radiator shell if struck from any direction.

I don't think that mentions it being motorized

The motor allows you to raise it after it has been retracted.

Then why is it spring-loaded?

> For the safety of any person being accidentally hit

(the spring handles the retraction)


But if a motor is needed to counter the retracting spring, doesn't that mean any impact must overcome the motor before the spring will engage?

Presumably the motor runs once to extend it and then it locks into position (with some kind of mechanical catch that's calibrated to come loose if you hit anything), rather than being constantly running.

"[G]lobal" is doing a lot of work in this sentence if I'm reading it as intended; this seems to exclude international conflict and intra-national strife (which are very big issues).

Iran is already quite dependent on the PRoC as a trading partner; using RMB as their primary currency for these payments would further increase their 'counter-party risk'. That said, RMB exchange-rate manipulation may also be a significant factor in their decision.

To define victory, you'd need to know their political objectives, which neither side has declared or otherwise made clear. On the one hand, the USA was unable to completely restrain Iran's ability to wreak local havoc, but on the other, Iran had many of its assets damaged, and now seems completely unable to prevent foreign actors from using its airspace almost at-will. It seems like the situation has shifted, and the result is inconclusive.

For the Iranian regime, to survive is to win.

Nuclear programme can only be stopped with boots on the ground.

America’s military is outdated compared to modern asymmetric warfare.

Iran may gain income from the strait.

It can now pursue a bomb knowing it will be hard to impossible for America to stop it.


Impossible without boots...

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