snoshy

now you're getting convicted instead of having an opportunity to correct the problem

You have completely ignored the fact that this is literally the opposite of what has (likely) happened in this case, and is provably almost the norm in countless other cases like this. There was an opportunity to make things right by the leadership. They did not choose to do so. At every step along the way.

Even assuming that these were honest mistakes (I don't believe so), the actions taken by leadership in most of these situations tend to wring the complainant out of the system. If there's a "free market" way to resolve these problems, this certainly ain't it, which calls for regulations. If those regulations aren't strong enough to coerce the intended result (if you find out one of your employees acted in this manner, immediately contact law enforcement and let them figure it out, otherwise you're in trouble as well), then you are actively encouraging an extrajudicial mechanism for resolving these matters. Specifically, you're encouraging civil remedies vs. criminal ones.

Failure to report isn't the problem here. It's that the failure to report has no consequences on people with adequate power, who get to create their own kangaroo court of dispute and certainly resolve cases to their own benefit.

The IEA has done a pretty terrible job of predicting the mix of energy sources over the recent past, largely being overly biased towards fossil fuels. I honestly wouldn't put a whole lot of stock in their predictions even if their claim is that energy-related CO2 would peak in 2025.

For those of us that chuckle at it at this time, this is likely to be far far far bigger than Y2K. The reason is because software that runs critical aspects of human life will have proliferated to a greater degree when compared to >2000, and <2038.

Before 2000, we had software running our systems, yes. But it was not as distributed, and not as ubiquitous, and not as deeply ingrained into human culture as it is today. This proliferation will obviously continue past today, and while hardware and low-level OS/software mitigations (as well as a herculean effort to clean up the mess) will make up the gap, it's not hard to see that this is likely to be much more impactful upon failure because of the "embeddedness" of these systems.

A box that has just been doing its thing for 40-50-60 years and all of a sudden fails, is likely to be more impactful than one that was 20-30 years old even.

Why would that be true in any alternate versions of these contests? I understand the enormous incentive mechanisms involved, and yet I cannot see this being obviously true.

Edit to add: if the authorship of the submitters is as above reproach as we are led to assume, why can that not be the case for the NIST decision panel itself?

Edit 2: answered already elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31993896

While I largely agree with you, and respect your opinion on these matters, the truth is that Dual EC was indeed a standard of the NIST, and therefore as a practical matter did get deployed by the public in whatever ill-informed manner for not having your elite cadre advice (yes, joking).

I appreciate the point about trust in the authorship of those presenting these algorithms, and I personally do accept it, but there's a lack of trust broadly (in the very community that these standards are intended for) in the process that your comments don't account for in this instance.

Great news. While this whole saga has built a sense of a trainwreck waiting to happen, I think this is the best result that everyone involved could have walked away with.

I have no doubt about Elon's intentions about what he plans to fix about Twitter the product, but I certainly don't expect things to go smoothly with wrangling Twitter the organization to actually achieve those results.

Tesla and SpaceX were built from the ground up with his personal principles in mind, and I think it will be quite the roller coaster for him to bring in the same sense of passion, discipline, and efficiency to Twitter. Twitter's inability to address many of its own longstanding issues is surely caused by a lack of will to do so. Turning around this ship will be no easy feat.

Oddly apropos anecdote to your pun:

About 15 years ago, while working on Windows at Microsoft, a test machine sitting at my desk hit a kernel panic (BSOD). As was standard working on the test team, the machine was already setup for kernel debugging, and so I set out to debug it a bit in order to file a decent bug report.

Hours later, I couldn't make sense of it (I wasn't super experienced at this point). A few of the nearby devs couldn't either, and a small troop of us curious enough about the puzzler eventually escalated to the resident wizard, Raymond Chen[1]. Within 15 minutes of checking our work and poking at the machine, he traced the root cause down to a bit flip.

Ray's condition indeed. :)

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

honestly i'm glad you brought up the reference to the awful censorship for this hilariously terrible movie. it made a mark somehow, and i still remembered (and waited for a reference to) it.

What name(s) do you have for it? What's the philology?

Great observation. It's frankly sad that it took this many years to implement such a common sense system, even though it comes with it's own flaws.

I highly doubt it's gonna do anything for call systems in general though. They've burned enough faith to last a long time.

That's certainly one kind of minimalism, but I think it goes well beyond what GP intended. While your comment and lifestyle seems earnest, it's a bit too far for most given the GP context, in the sense that rather than minimizing the time taken to do routine things, it optimizes many of them out entirely to the point that it does not appear practicable for most (ex. mattress being the only furniture). Such things can certainly be taken to even further extremes: why buy a mattress? A sleeping bag might do fine and might well be good for your back. Everybody draws a line, and for even relatively extreme folks, that line is certainly shaped by social norms.

I'd wager there's a rather large number of folks like GP intending to minimize the effort required to do drone-ish tasks rather than eliminate them. I don't deny that it's only a logical next step to eliminate them entirely, but that seems a step too far for social conventions. After all, culture defies logic rather often.

Not to mention that order mix is almost always guaranteed to be a highly prized secret that companies rarely give out. You don't see Apple breaking down iPhone shipments by their variants in detail.

* Four additional gigafactories already in development

Where did you see this? Best I can tell, 4 new models (Cybertruck, Roadster, Semi, Unannounced) are in development but only one more gigafactory (TBD) is in the works. Perhaps you misread things?

Agree though, astounding rate of growth at this scale.

Of course, but I'd be more likely to give the job to the person who could decipher such madness and explain it clearly any day over the author.

Code should be written to be understood by humans first and foremost. The person who can understand such deliberate garbage clearly and explain it well to those who don't understand, well, those people are the perfect human debuggers, in my opinion.

Cortana's revenge for Microsoft shutting her down.

They do, but we make exceptions for appliance power all the time. Laundry appliances frequently have a higher voltage circuit dedicated for them, at least in California.

Why not treat the exception as the exception? Appliances might consume disproportionately more power, but they're much more static compared to the variety of devices frequently plugged in and out of a home's sockets, most of which have to lug around an inefficient rectifier with them.

True. But while a high voltage converter might be expensive, it's far more efficient and would pay off costs over the duration of the life of a home. Having a single one of those per home should surely be a net win. The utility is responsible for high voltage AC transforms down to the home, and the homeowner fronts the cost of the centralized expensive but efficient converter to power the DC circuit within the home.

If solar and local generation are thrown in the mix, they bypass the converter and directly power the home circuit.

Why wouldn't this be more globally optimal?

edit: derped the converter

Tons of amateur space nerds are analyzing every frame of video that's been gathered about the incident. Here's a gif [1] posted on NASASpaceFlight but originally shot by LabPadre that shows that some of the legs on the left extended and then flopped back and forth a bit, whereas the ones on the right extended and stayed that way. Commenters on Twitter have also pointed out the same [2].

[1] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;... [2] https://twitter.com/TerminalCount/status/1367261799293272068

I very highly doubt the lean is expected. The fact is that 2-3 of the landing legs deployed but did not lock into their extended position, which resulted in the lean this time. This also caused structural damage to the engines and tanks, causing the rupture and kaboom.

This is actually normal, and expected. The issue with these specific Starship tests is that the flight plan calls for 1) a height of ~10 km, 2) not going supersonic. The second one is quite critical, because supersonic flight introduces much greater stresses on the craft.

Given these two limitations, Starship currently carries very little fuel. Think of it like a mostly empty soda can with a few sips sloshing about the bottom. Adding 3 Raptor engines to such a tank makes them way too powerful to run at 100% thrust the whole time.

On the launchpad, all 3 Raptors start off at full thrust until well clear of the pad. At that point, one engine at a time starts throttling down gradually, so as not to go supersonic or exceed the 10 km flight plan. A throttled engine does not burn as cleanly or efficiently, which is what results in the orange exhaust plume. Same as your campfire, blue flame is hotter than orange/red flame, and the bluer exhaust engine is therefore burning hotter and providing more thrust.

As Starship gets closer to the 10 km peak, it shuts off one engine at a time, and finally throttles the final Raptor down as low as it can go. Note that Raptor engines have a minimum throttle that is ~20% of max thrust, below which the only option is to shut down.

The issue is that the vast majority of these ingredients are artificial substitutes for the actual content of a pizza-like-thing that an average consumer might expect. That they are artificial is not in itself inherently an issue (at least to me, although many many artificial additives have been proven to cause problems while manufacturers continue to use them), but the fact that so many substitutions are made all at once in a given product renders any "common" understanding of its health effects effectively irrelevant.

It basically means that you can't compare a pizza made from the basic ingredients that you and I might normally expect to the contents of a hot pocket. Even comparing apples-to-apples, the ingredient list of a DiGiorno's frozen pizza would be wildly different from the basics of a pizza you could make yourself.

Fearmongering over these subjects never helps, but it is fair to raise concern over the unknown effects of the things you consume.

The old school response, weaponized without being inappropriate.

Oppressive regimes even of the most extreme order still need to deal with reality and the choices of other parties that aren't fully within their control. If Google/Apple were to take a stand here and walk away, it would put tremendous pressure on Pakistani government, and make this a hot button issue. Imagine the entire nation waking up one day to find that their apps no longer function because their leaders made choices that they likely weren't even aware were being made. It would certainly cause the constituents of these regimes to reconsider their support of the leaders. Pakistan is a democracy, however broken it may be, and you can sure bet that other political parties would step in to fill this role.

In this case maybe the analogy is that Apple/Google is supplying water - for money - but this oppressive regime uses it to waterboard people.

I mean no, that's definitely not the analogy. When Google/Apple remove these apps from their stores, they're directly taking action to further the oppression. It's not some innocent bystander thing, they literally have to write code or take other actions to make this happen. Remember, the status quo is that the apps stay in the store today. An explicit action is required to change that.

Coinbase did need something like Mt. Gox to become what they are today, but not in the sense you imply. The whole Mt. Gox episode opened people's eyes up to the fact that large institutional frauds could take place with their Bitcoin wealth, and that there indeed was a need for a well managed reputable provider for these services. Bad actors can come in many sizes, and a bad actor of Mt. Gox scale also brought about plenty of controversy and media attention that was heaped on this subject. It benefited Coinbase in no small part to capitalize on this already acknowledged need for a business.

It sure seems additive in this case. Google & Apple can choose not to do business in regulatory regimes that are oppressive in nature. That obviously comes at a direct cost of lost revenue from abstinence. It is a deliberate choice to do business anywhere at all. The simple fix here as you say, would be to stop doing business when forced to enact business practices that further oppression.

Make no mistake, it is monetary greed that drives the choice to assent to this.

It's a common way of describing deadlines in the aerospace industry, since a lot can go wrong with large complex engineering projects in the physical world. It's usually abbreviated to NET.

This is a fair point to consider. Perhaps my claim was a bit overbroad.

Yes, this was my intent. It's not that security researchers don't publish this kind of thing... it's just that there are a million rabbit holes to explore, and probably only like 0.1% of those dead ends get written about.

Anyone that's new to the industry? Non-technical folks that keep hearing about git hugs?

This is the equivalent of a negative research result that looked into whether there's anything more to explore here to produce the really juicy result like a true compromise, but instead shows that there's nothing that a set of highly qualified researchers can prove, at least. I applaud more of this, although it is not an infrequent practice among the top security engineers, I feel it sets a precedent for research broadly.

Nothing to be found here as far as we know, is still a result that deserves publishing. Let's make it more of the norm.