HN user
New testing done at China’s Shidaowan nuclear power plant has confirmed its ability to be naturally cooled down, an industry-first milestone for achieving commercial-scale inherent safety, according to researchers.
Amazing. Well done! How far this country has come in the last few decades is nothing short of breathtaking.
Shitpost in, shitpost out.
I for one would like to see Alex Jones on the DOGE committee because of all the things he was up to in the decades past. Not a popular opinion I know, but there it is.
As outbreaks continued to occur, the mortality rate surpassed 50 percent.
Discuss.
I read through most of this to realize the author isn’t saying much so feel free to skip. They mostly put together a list of the sort of things you can find in a public library for $1.50 in late charges. They put them in a kind of an order trying to argue a point but I can’t take them seriously. It’s bullshit and ChatGPT could write a more convincing narrative.
(nb. I should start printing out Bloomberg articles and selling them to be used as bird cage flooring. They may yet find their target audience there.)
The smugness of that article had me thinking I was reading The Atlantic for a moment.
I have in the past applied a similar (though broader-stroked) analogy to other things, by simply asking “if things were to continue this way, could a civilization or at least a society be built out of it?” The answer in a lot of cases of the things we do today, from health and food, jobs and work, living and dying and dating and marriage and all sorts of other things is no.
Why is this even measured? What do we actually achieve from this metric as a goal, one way or another?
If you’d put this much effort every day into privacy laws, neither Google nor journos would be able to snoop. But, here we are, and it’s fair game.
Sounds like the issues around dating, marriage and children aren’t really cut and dry in Japan. The population crisis isn’t a “just so” thing. The society optimized for one set of criteria but is buckling under others.
I haven’t yet had a chance to work on aerospace (or beyond) equipment though I do work on medical grade things and some of the parts are aerospace certified, though they haven’t been put through the ringer. In particular, I work with high voltage/amperage, high liquid pressure and high temperature systems. Some of it has been running for close to 25-30 years with very few issues. Only recently have I had to open a power supply that degraded since it was first put into service (over 20 years ago). I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me. I want the person, if anyone, who comes after to see the work that’s of higher standard than what came out of the factory. No machine can continue working forever, but one can get much closer to having fewer failure points. As an aside, to get to here however was a struggle of obtaining all sorts of things I shouldn’t have access to because the manufacturer started locking access down heavily. Story for another time.
For the HN ultra-nerds: is there a book that details the voyager 1 construction including sensors, PCBs, materials compositions manufacturing processes and all that? I’m looking for something so dense I’ll need a therapist to find my way back to society afterwards. Truly curious thank you.
Most of our car engines run at a small fraction of their capability, even when going at highway speeds. Most servers have a 15-25% utilization to handle failover situations. If you have a beefy as fuck set up with extra wide tolerance margins, things can last for a very long time. Car engines with a chamber that’s essentially containing explosions still end up running for decades with very little maintenance. Well, some longer than others. This is also true for consumer electronics/appliances. You still have things going just fine from almost a century ago. Yes, some things fail faster than others and the designers were aware of limitations and trade offs, but most components continue working. What would be wise in this case is to look at how the voyager was designed for reliability to understand why it hasn’t completely gone off the rails. Meaning, what are the common anpproaches and why do they fail, and why doesn’t the voyager fail. What does it do that’s different than the usual method. Lots to be learned there but I don’t think the people were wizards, they probably dealt with very brittle things and had tight specs and knew how to design certain parts to very close to perfect. The manufacturing of parts plays a huge role in reliability. If you know you can achieve better manufacturing output but it is a matter of cost, then that’s easy - government can pay whatever. But if you don’t know, then that’s a harder situation to be in and that’s guess work. But if you have a capacitor that’s normally 20% off rating that you’d buy in a store, and you know you can get it to be down to 1% off or even less from rating, then you go for that with everything you’ve got. And all parts are made with as wide of tolerance as you can get so that as they degrade, things can still work. Easier said than done, but there it is. Things will eventually break and not work. But for now, Voyager has bought time, quite literally.
Embedded. Your UB is my opportunity.
Yeah I actually read just about all of this. It’s amusing to me because the language used to express banal ideas is so over the top but the subject matter borders on pseudoscience. “Cultish academia”? Not sure. I’m still trying to determine if this is an elaborate troll.
I’ll act as a counter-balance on this topic. I have conducted hundreds of technical interviews across varying levels of experience - from interns and juniors all the way to PhD grads and those with lots of years under their belt. I have extensive hands-on experience in multiple fields and passable knowledge in others. If a candidate has worked on something in the past, a good position for me to be in is to know more about what they’ve done than they do. A passable position is one where they can walk me through what they’ve done and I pick up as I go along, piecing it together in my head with what I already know. I very rarely have pre-canned questions, instead I opt to come up with examples on the fly based on how the conversation (and it is a conversation) is unfolding. If the candidate is gold, I will usually have a first offer prepared for the candidate before the interview is over, and I do not cheap out on the offers. Candidates have historically reached out to express they enjoyed the interview even if an offer was not presented. I believe in respecting the candidate, respecting that people can be nervous and shy one day and social the next, that people interview differently, and that more interview rounds does not necessarily yield a better result. Prerequisite for this is you have to enjoy talking to people, put your bullshit ego aside, show your hand where you think it will help the candidate, and know what you’re talking about and what you don’t know. People can learn, people can adapt. Every so often, I accept candidates that would otherwise be rejected on the understanding that no “system” is ever perfect, certainly not one that involves people. It saddens me to see coding challenge, especially automated ones, because it shows laziness on part of the interviewer. However, it is a skill that must be attained and practiced like any other. And no, I haven’t used the return key since the 8th grade. AMA.
That would be a follow up question if the answer to the first question is “yes.”
Whenever medical advice is being thrown around by anonymous handles, it helps to ask one simple question to clear the air: “Are you a doctor?”