HN user

pithon

283 karma
Posts0
Comments73
View on HN
No posts found.

I was at a beachhouse north of Boston and I thought someone fell out of bed or dropped something really heavy upstairs. It was loud and the whole house shook. All of us were scouring the internet for like an hour, finding absolutely nothing "official" or any mention of it on news sites- just tons of subreddits and other social media blowing up all over the Northeast wondering what the heck it was.

These look fantastic. If there's one thing I'd really like to automate with AI instead of hand coding, though, it would be making charts!

I sketched something in the first sky and then our started putting up blobs with a single word like "sun" and "banana." I have no idea what's going on.

Why Is GPS Free? 3 years ago

The value of RTK is partially that they are stationary and can average out noise over time to get an accurate position estimate, but mostly that they're sending you their live signal measurements so you can cancel out biases common to receivers which are geographically co-located.

Why Is GPS Free? 3 years ago

The almanac is not needed. The ephemeris is basically just almanac orbital data plus extra terms to make it accurate enough for meter-level positioning or better. I'm not sure what you mean by saying the orbital parameters change over days. Ephemerides are updated every ~2 hours to maintain precise positioning.

Why Is GPS Free? 3 years ago

Discarding assisted GPS where GPS data messages are obtained through about channel such as cellular or Wifi...

Almanac gives coarse satellite position information (and some other stuff), good enough to know which ones are probably visible and therefore prioritize signal acquisition attempts which used to be very very costly in terms of signal processing. That's the message that takes up 12.5 minutes to piece together. Nowadays you can just brute force all possible satellite signals and there's no need to wait around for the almanac information. Each satellite signal broadcasts precise satellite location information (ephemeris), which takes maybe 30 seconds to get a few frames I believe. So that's basically the bottleneck for a modern chipset which starts with zero information and relies solely on the GPS signals to navigate.

You can take an amplitude-vs-time representation of a signal and via a Fourier Transform instead represent the same information as a sum of weighted complex exponentials in the frequency domain. It works mathematically, sure- but does that mean that- physically, at the core of existence- every RF, acoustic, seismic, or financial data ripple is actually a bunch of sines and cosines which are getting summed together to create the real phenomena?

In many ways, sites/tools like sourceforge and github made it much easier to publish and obtain open source software, leading to much more software being created and shared. I'm suggesting that "too much content" isn't a problem, and leads to good things.

It feels as if this is about to explode an existing problem, namely, there's too much content in the world already

Imagine applying that same perspective to software, pre-github.

Okta Outage 5 years ago

So glad that half my company's internal stuff falls apart when some external service goes down... I couldn't even submit tickets to my company's helpdesk about the other networking issues I was having. What a joke.

I've heard people break the design/implement/test phases down to essentially equal parts in terms of cost. It's not a small task if you think about a government agency's testing capabilities potentially needing to be roughly 1/3 of what the private industry is throwing at it. I can see where they need to be pragmatic and adopt a stance where they're really just overseeing the vendor's testing and doing some spot checks. Not ideal, though.

It sounds strange when my colleagues refer to a class in Python having an a-TRIB-ute rather than an ATT-tri-bute. I'm familiar with the verb form stressing the middle syllable and the noun form stressing the first.

Writing is thinking and oftentimes just being able to explain in words what a thing does, should do, and should not do- has tremendous value as part of the design process before any code is written.

> Not writing doesn’t block shipping (at least not right away).

It should.

The rub is that it might not block what's currently being shipped. But that debt can come back to introduce headaches and delays for the next ship.