HN user
Senior Aerospace Software Engineer building the road to space. If I ship bugs, people might literally die. If you want to help build the road to space, let's talk.
I've told them over and over I'm not capable of that
I can relate and empathize. And also provide this suggestion based on my own similar experience: if you can't provide evidence (e.g. doctor's diagnosis) that you are "special" or "not capable of that", then they don't have to care and will take steps to force you out. I wish you all the best.
Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons
Admittedly I haven't been to many concerts, but 'national security reasons' seems like a reasonable rationale to me because a packed concert sounds like a great place to set off a suicide bomb vest for maximum impact. Have a cut-out who doesn't raise any red flags buy the ticket and hand it off to the person wearing the vest. No ID check? Mass panic ensues when the vest goes off, and people are hurt in the stampede for the exits even if the blast radius of the vest itself isn't all that large.
In my workplace, its availability. We have to use US-only models for government-compliance reasons, so we have access to Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4, but only Gemini 2.5 which isn't in the same class as the first two.
And you'd lose that wager.
I complain about movie costs while I watch movies at home, drive a VW that was under $40k new, live in a state with a minimum wage over $17 an hour, and refuse to pay $14 plus tip to a food truck that doesn't provide seating when I can pay $12 and no tip at a fast food restaurant that does provide dine-in eating.
Some of us live our principles, we're not all just whinging hypocrites.
when I have something to say about my day, there's nowhere to say it; no one on HN cares whether I fixed up the blinds or cooked pork steaks.
As someone who lives alone, two ways I address this aspect: talk to yourself out loud and to your pets like they're people, and also write these things down in a journal. Every night after I get into bed but before I turn out the light and fall asleep, I write a journal entry. Sometimes they're quite mundane, exactly like your examples. "I cooked a steak for dinner that turned out better than I expected" or "Tomorrow I'm thinking about making some bread." There's no pressure on length of entry, I fill anywhere from three sentences to a full page each night, but it helps fill the 'how do I communicate this minor accomplishment or discomfort that nobody else cares about' need for me.
Sounds good. So they've cancelled all Starship-related construction at LC-39A at KSC, because Texas, right?
I haven't tried it myself so you might be right, but I was thinking of the silver conductive pens from Chemtronics with a conductivity of 0.02-0.05 ohms/sq/mil.
For attachment, I'd evaluate their conductive epoxy or maybe glue down the underside of the component and then smother the lead with the silver conductive ink. But again, just hypothetical since I have a quickturn shop make cheap prototype PCBs for me and either hand solder or use a stencil, paste, and a hot air gun for my hobbyist projects.
For the 2D version, you might not need very much custom. Use a regular pen plotter and use a pen with conductive ink. These both exist today, though personally as a hobbyist PCB designer, I can get 2-layer and 4-layer boards cheap enough from JLCPCB or Oshpark or PCB Unlimited that I don't bother trying to make them myself.
For me its the commodities.
I grant that SpaceX engineers are smart people and can figure out how to make Starship and Superheavy reliable and reusable.
But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed to prevent it all from boiling off once in orbit before Lunar Starship can get there, get refueled and head to the moon? I don't know the answer to that, and to me that seems like the hard problem.
I'm an embedded software engineer by day and like it or not I have to acknowledge that AI tooling is coming to our work, so I'm currently working on learning to interact with AI coding tools like Claude Code more effectively and efficiently by "vibe-coding" a game for a family member on my personal time. Something inspired by a blend of 'Recettear' and 'Stardew Valley' with the touch that the player shopkeeper is an anthropomorphic cat.
Not OP, but one example I can think of: Jeff Bezos moved from Washington state to Florida two years after Washington enacted a 7% capital gains tax "on the sale or exchange of long-term capital assets such as stocks, bonds, business interests, or other investments and tangible assets"[1] which "reportedly helped him save $1 billion in taxes."[2]
[1] https://dor.wa.gov/taxes-rates/other-taxes/capital-gains-tax
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeff-bezos-moved-florida-impa...
You don't support trying to save the planet?
The Bezos Earth Fund: https://www.bezosearthfund.org/
I think it might be a organizational architecture that needs to change.
However, we have never before applied a killswitch to a rule with an action of “execute”.
This is a straightforward error in the code, which had existed undetected for many years
So they shipped an untested configuration change that triggered untested code straight to production. This is "tell me you have no tests without telling me you have no tests" level of facepalm. I work on safety-critical software where if we had this type of quality escape both internal auditors and external regulators would be breathing down our necks wondering how our engineering process failed and let this through. They need to rearchitect their org to put greater emphasis on verification and software quality assurance.
In particular, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the HTTP signature verification code would strongly benefit from memory safe languages
Critical infrastructure still written in C - particularly code that parses data from untrusted sources - is technical debt that is only going to get worse over time.
But hasn't all that foundational code been stable and wrung out already over the last 30+ years? The .tar and .ar file formats are both from the 70s; what new benefits will users or developers gain from that thoroughly battle-tested code being thrown out and rewritten in a new language with a whole new set of compatibility issues and bugs?
Oh yeah, derp. I was thinking unaligned-PER, not BER.
I worked with ASN.1 for a few years in the embedded space because its used for communications between aircraft and air traffic control in Europe [1]. I enjoyed it. BER encoding is pretty much the tightest way to represent messages on the wire and when you're charged per-bit for messaging, it all adds up. When a messaging syntax is defined in ASN.1 in an international standard (ICAO 9880 anyone?), its going to be around for a while. Haven't been able to get my current company to adopt ASN.1 to replace our existing homegrown serialization format.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_Telecommunication...
This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore.
It doesn't say she chooses to use it; it says she can't work without using it. At my workplace, senior leadership has mandated that software engineers use our internal AI chat tooling daily, they monitor the usage statistics, and are updating engineering leveling guides to include sufficient usage of AI being required for promotions. So I can't work without AI anymore, but it doesn't mean I choose to.
those who want to parse a JSON document with a YAML parser.
I've done it. We already had a YAML parser in an internal library I maintain since we were already ingesting YAML files for other reasons, so when we later added new files for a different reason that someone decided should be in JSON instead, it was easier and cleaner to keep using the existing YAML parser we already had incorporated rather than add a separate JSON parser along side it.
It has not so far.
"Experts say that airdrops, another measure Israel announced, are insufficient for the immense need in Gaza and dangerous to people on the ground."[1]
"[T]he airdrops have an advantage over trucks because planes can move aid to a particular location very quickly. But in terms of volume, the airdrops will be 'a supplement to, not a replacement for moving things in by ground.'"[2]
The airdrops killed people when 1) the containers landed on occupied tents and, 2) containers landed in the water and people drowned attempting to retrieve the aid. Trucks can also delivery vastly larger quantities of aid substantially faster and cheaper than planes.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/gaza-starvation-israel-palestinia...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-airdrop-humanit...
We're in the greater Seattle area and I make north of $200k, so I feel like yes :shrug:
My department at the place I work is actively hiring Software Engineers. We have nine open requisitions for any seniority level and are regularly conducting interviews, but the new-grad candidates this year have been... disappointing.
I've conducted two phone screens this month and asked each candidate to implement FizzBuzz in their language of choice after giving them an explanation of the problem. Both took more than ten minutes to write out a solution and we don't even require them to run it; I'll excuse trivial syntax errors in an interview setting if I can tell what you meant.
When CS students can't write a basic for loop and use the modulo operator without relying on AI, I weep for their generation.
That's very interesting! Thanks for the recommendation, definitely something I'll consider.
the price seems way high.
How much is your child's finger worth?
I'm looking at getting a SawStop table saw so I can teach my child woodworking with slightly more peace-of-mind that if something goes wrong, they'll be less likely to lose one or more fingers. Kids get distracted, they forget what rules you've taught them in the past, accidents happen.
This is also a tool I'll consider purchasing to provide my child an introduction to the concepts before graduating to the bigger, louder, stronger wood saws.
I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us
After getting a new W11 laptop at work and discovering the removal of vertical taskbars (ridiculous on 16:9 monitors), that particular loss is specifically what keeps me from "upgrading" from W10. Windows Updates warns me that "certain features aren't available on Windows 11" without specifying which ones; finding that sane placement of my taskbar is one of them means I'm plenty willing to pay $30 for another year of security updates to get to keep W10.
most classes are not designed to be inherited but want to expose a clean public API.
While true that all classes can be inherited
That's what the 'final' keyword in C++ is for: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/final.html
"Specifies that a virtual function cannot be overridden in a derived class, or that a class cannot be derived from."
I always thought it was weird that I had to apply with my transcripts and resume.
I similarly thought it weird when Garmin asked me for transcripts when I applied there a few years ago. It had been 15 years since I'd graduated, so I was lucky I still had a couple copies of my official transcripts from back then. After spending the effort to find and scan them in with my 3.8 GPA, didn't even get a phone screen.
The grandparent said
support wireless CarPlay and android auto
Removing LTE doesn't cost me real-time traffic updates because (preferred maps app) is running on my phone which already has LTE. Streaming media? The media is being played from my phone or streamed via my phone, which already has LTE. I'm not sure what "remote controls" are in this context? Letting me set the A/C fan to high from Internet (almost certainly via a browser or app running on... wait for it... my phone)?
We've already paid for the LTE modems and app integration on the phone side of things, don't need to pay for it a second time on the car side or have to deal with the vehicle manufacturer's terrible implementations of navigation apps and media streaming services or yet another vendor collecting telemetry about me and reselling it to whoever wants to pay.
An outside individual purchasing shares is not the same as employees accessing liquidity.
As one example, SpaceX is privately held but routinely does funding rounds with large investors so employees can sell shares and access liquidity[1][2]. A $10,000 minimum purchase amount is trivial for those investors.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/elon-musks-spacex-raises-...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spacex-fu...
I use DDG multiple times a day, every day. I don't find ChatGPT to be a suitable substitute for helping me locate resources on the web; hallucinated links waste my time trying to get to useful information.
Do restaurant service fees next! "Here's the bill, with a 10% service fee added so we can pay our staff more without raising menu prices."