jedc

It looks like the account where this repo was published was the one used by Google Workspace DevRel? (And that’s the team this guy worked on.)

That makes this quite a bit different situation than publishing the repo on a personal account.

Data points that worry me:

02/1967 - Apollo 1 fire

01/1986 - Challenger disaster (19 yrs later)

02/2003 - Columbia disaster (17 yrs later)

It's been 23 years since Columbia, and there seems to be a 20-ish year rhythm to NASA disasters where the organization learns lessons, becomes more careful... and then standards potentially slip.

from the docs:

"Wealthfolio does not currently support integration with online brokers or aggregators. Data must be imported from CSV files or by manually entering transactions."

"store contact information and related notes for small and medium businesses"

Most likely translation: it affected the Google SMB sales team's Salesforce instance

I was visiting Yosemite a year-ish ago and a guide recommended this app and it was fantastic. My kids also loved getting the real-time info on what they were hearing, and trying to spot the various kinds of birds.

Strongly recommend it (though admittedly, I don't use it often in suburbia)

(Former submariner here.)

Elevated CO2 in submarines absolutely impairs performance. One example: there was a guy on my boat who got migraines when CO2 got too high - he was useless. Luckily the fix is simple - just turn on another CO2 scrubber.

There's nothing special about a submarine that makes CO2 somehow different than anywhere else.

I used to row in London on the Thames, and yeah, the tides are nuts. The river rises seven meters in the span of about 3-4 hours. (It takes about 7-8 hours to flow out.)

I got to know Quentin Stafford-Fraser a bit when I was at Cambridge. He's a really down-to-earth guy who was working on all sorts of interesting projects.

He's got more details on the whole Trojan Room Coffee Pot experience on his blog: https://quentinsf.com/coffeepot/

Sounds like the plot of Michael Crichton's book "Airframe" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airframe_(novel)

(Though in this case the parts were found before anyone was hurt/killed!)

It's unlikely to go offline. They've got the funding to keep it open, they're just waiting on federal acceptance of their continuation plans.

Great Wikipedia reference about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess

Years ago I got to know a startup that effectively reverse-engineered the punchcard-like code necessary to run about half of the massive textile looms used in factories all over the world. Instead of needing to use the ancient systems / software that the loom ran, they built software that could effectively treat the loom as a printer.

It took them a while to find the right business model, but now they partner with huge brands to offer them textile customization AT SCALE, which previously was pretty much unheard of. - https://www.unmade.com/

The main thing is that you need to be moving at least a few knots in order for your control surfaces (rudder, forward planes, stern planes) to work.

The US doesn't have diesel boats anymore. Though other countries (like Australia) do.

antenna buoys on cables? No.

But there are VLF antennas that Ohio-class submarines have to receive low-data-rate comms while submerged.

Any reasonable communications have to be made while at periscope depth. (Which is subtly different than "having to surface"... at PD just the thin mast is out of the water.)

Ohio-class submarines (the ones that carry missiles): when they're "on station" they're just tooling around staying as quiet as they can. There's a relevant phrase for them: "Three knots to nowhere"

Los Angeles and Virginia-class submarines are always doing something: doing exercises, transiting from one location to another, etc. And typically multiple things at once. While the boat is transiting from an exercise area to homeport, the team is doing engineering drills, or other kinds of training. Or the forward part of the boat is doing exercises with a carrier battle group while the engineering team is doing engineering drills. (There's ALWAYS engineering drills or maintenance happening.)

Fuel isn't a primary concern: a nuclear reactor is fueled for the life of the boat, so 30-ish years. That said, effective life of a reactor is something the Navy tracks closely, and depending on the life of the boat, the life left in the reactor, some boats are decommissioned as they get close to the end of their fuel life, and others get re-fueled. (And in the case of the USS San Francisco, who had recently been refueled before it hit an underwater mountain, they cut off the front half of the submarine and welded the front half of a recently-decommissioned submarine on, because the reactor and fuel was too valuable to go to waste)

Former submariner here with a quibble on this:

one of the primary reasons subs need to surface , in order to GPS lock

While getting a GPS position is helpful, the primary reason a submarine goes to periscope depth regularly is for communications. The Navy needs to send information to submarines and know that they'll get it and take action within a certain timeframe. That's by far the primary driver.

Active sonar (where a device sends a pulse of energy & listens to replies) can impact marine life.

Passive sonar (where you just listen to acoustic energy in the water) is used by submarines and surface ships to find submarines. With both on-board and towed sonar.

Submarines don't have any sonar designed to map the sea floor, though there are tools to identify the depth below the keel at any given time. Creating proper maps of the sea floor are done by much more specialized equipment/systems/processes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...

(former US submariner here)

Also commented downthread, but sonar IS always on at all times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35780124

Honestly, I'm extraordinarily surprised that the USS San Francisco didn't sink killing everyone onboard. Have you seen the photos? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)#/m...

The only reason that the submarine was able to get to the surface and stay there after this was because the damage was just on the port (left) side. Even with that luck, they were only able to stay on the surface because a piece of equipment was able to stay running for several times longer than it was designed to do.

You can read more about it in various places (like here: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/what-happens-when-s... ) but imagine being at work and suddenly getting thrown toward a wall at 20++mph. Damages and injuries everywhere, and its a miracle only one person died.

(Former US submariner)

Yes, and no.

Yes- the US has maps with higher-resolution data on water depth around the world than what's commercially available.

No - those maps aren't perfect. Some areas are extraordinarily well-mapped, others are less so.

Submarine crews are trained not to check just the charts that are in use for a particular voyage, but also other charts covering the same area. (The USS San Francisco collision has no evidence of a seamount on the charts in use, but there was "discoloration" on another chart covering the same area.)

former US submariner here:

* forward-facing sonar is always being used at all times while a submarine is underway

* however, the sonar that's always used is passive, and since mountains don't move, passive sonar doesn't find them

* active sonar could theoretically be used, but the risk of communicating a submarine's position relative to the chance that you'd hit an underwater mountain is balanced strongly on the side of running silent.

Ah, interesting. So it sounds like they haven't updated the data in ages, either.

What I always loved about this site is that Google made it SUPER-easy to visualize just how good (or not) any given roof was for solar. At the time it launched, you had to get deep into the sales process with a solar vendor to get that kind of data/understanding.

I just tried a couple of big current-day providers and it looks like that's largely still true. Pick My Solar was the only one who would even try to give an estimate of solar potential without requiring an email address or full-on lead gen.

So at least for the people whose homes haven't changed in the past 5 years, some of the core visualizations will still be useful.

That article is only about the lead-generation part of Project Sunroof being shut down. Which makes a ton of sense - it was likely not generating much revenue, but managing a program like that can suck up a ton of time in managing those relationships. It's just easier to kill it and let everyone compete in search results instead.

You're correct in that the design hasn't been updated in years, but... so? From poking around in my city, everything still seems to work the same. (Though I wonder if the estimates are now out of date...)

+1 to basic facts being off. The line that stuck out to me was:

"Some APMs had convinced company leadership that we needed a Facebook competitor."

Ummmm... no. This was very much a top-down strategy choice from Larry on down. There's no way the product goals COMPANY-WIDE is driven by anything but an executive edict.

Also torpedos (for example, from submarines)

Disagree. I was looking for a 3-row EV SUV and the only two options were a Tesla Model X and a Rivian R1S. (Maybe that's changed?)

They are both companies making EV-powered passenger cars? (And ONLY EV-powered vehicles).

It's also easier to cut costs from a premium-priced product than it is to build that reputation in the first place.

I loved my Newton. I loved it so much that even when it was stolen out of my car in ~2003, I got a MessagePad 2100 off of eBay to replace it.

It was only when the iPhone came out that someone was able to pry my Newton out of my hands.

I got out well before you :) but when I was on my boat IT was run by FTs.