In terms of downvotes, what really irks me and what I often see is people posting factually correct information, but still being sent into faded oblivion because some sect of the community's worldview doesn't agree with the facts.
If someone uses factually correct information to make a comment thread worse, I can see how downvotes could be justified.
Since comment scores was removed this is the only way to signal this to others besides the original commenter.
That said it should not be overused. If it annoys someone I guess they should downvote it but I don't think there is a need to reflexively downvote every time someone adds a friendly meta comment.
(And if people start gaming it for karma farming I guess it should be downvoted relentlessly until that stops :-)
So no, it's probably not as useful as the comment it was referring too, but it was useful (to some of us) as it pertains to the community as a whole.
Well, in opposing it I especially read the faded comments and upvote any of those that are not completely abhorrent.
Take that, ycombinator.
This seems to happen a lot more frequently here than anywhere else.
I'm not really sure what that says, other than people still read comments that are faded. Also that people shouldn't worry about self-censoring.
I don't have a problem with downvotes or the karma needed to do it, but
I do sometimes wish it were possible to reply to a dead comment, especially if you vouch for it and it's still dead.
Sometimes they're worth defending, or is relevant in a non-obvious way, and sometimes the comment itself is discussion worthy, as it relates to the topic, even if it's wrong or seems trollish.
I'm being sincere here since I also appreciate book recommendations and I get probably half my book recommendations from HN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb...
My favorite part is when they needed the version of the software that was used for the moon landing but they only had the source code for a previous version (scanned from giant binder) and the hash value of the version of the landing. By a series of educated guesses, by reading memos and by analysis of the source code they modified the old code the exact way so it gave them the correct hash, confirming that they correctly and exactly recreated the original code.
It's being a while and I go from memory, I might have some details wrong. See this video for this story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JTa1RQxU04
Apollo 13 was the story of a 'successful failure', while Apollo 14 shows how hard work and creative thinking can turn failure into success.
I saw this but it's a short documentary and may not be what you meant: https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-14-Complete-Downlink-Edition/d...
Jim Lovell was undeniably a badass but I watched that movie and thought the heroes were the ones reading telemetry off a computer screen and using their slide rule to figure out what to do. I hope Hidden Figures does that for another generation.
I noticed on the last season of the Expanse that Luna headquarters was named after him and bothered to look him up. Dude's 93 and still kicking!
It's amazing how well the astronaut medical screening worked. Unless they get killed in the line of duty, these guys are all living incredibly long.
On the other hand watching a stream involving something on Mars, let alone voyager, would be pretty boring!
Send: ls
Ok let's take a 20 minute break.
For LEO satellites, that usually means you have 2 blocks of 3 13 minute passes, when the groundstation is in The Netherlands. For a Svalbard groundstation, you get a lot more, but still 13 minute or less passess.
Imagine dictating shell commands, over the phone, to a salesperson who has no idea what half the characters are that you're asking him to type, and the only output signal I could come up with was ejecting the CD tray, which was just visible from the ground...
(Note that the goal wasn't usually to fix things on the spot, it was more to triage things like whether we needed to have a replacement projector on hand, which was a big deal.)
I don't know enough about ssh and terminals to know if it's possible to type "12345" and see "12345" echoed back to me but really what the remote session sees is "1245".
Nowadays, links and systems get easier to work with, and you can sometimes have a literal TTY open to the system, like Reactor Hello World has ( https://reaktorspace.com/reaktor-hello-world/ ). However, this is over S-band, which is a 2Mbit/s link, so overhead for a stable TTY (or ethernet connection) is a lot less than using UHF/VHF.
Ground processing was a totally separate program and contract from mission control, though, so my team only ever received data from the satellites. We never sent data to them.
You can see how NASA people react to tough situations by watching the videos of mission control during the Challenger and Columbia disasters. No shouting. No arguments. Just cool professionalism and restrained emotions.
They have a job to do, and they do it well even under stress. "Steely-eyed missile men/women" indeed.
There are plenty of NASA engineers and leaders who lose their cool. I’m only saying that so people don’t overly lionize them in a way that prevents them from pursuing a similar job because they feel they are somehow cut from a different cloth.
“The O-rings were never tested in extreme cold.”[1]
There wasn’t data which led to discussions about uncertainty, but that shouldn’t be conflated with irrefutable evidence of failure.
The obviousness of it (like many engineering failures) was only apparent in hindsight.
“Evidence, in retrospect, points to a long period of time, especially based on post-flight inspections when the joint design weakness was ‘sending a message’ and the true potential of this message was not perceived and reacted to.”[2]
“Not perceived” isn’t compatible with “irrefutable evidence that it would fail”.
[1] https://www.space.com/31732-space-shuttle-challenger-disaste...
[2]https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-99hrpt1016/pdf/...
Satisfying, but not exactly must watch tv.
What's in your head could be though. That's my pet theory on the movie Hackers, what we're seeing on the computer screens isn't what's actually there, it's the characters' mental constructs visualized.
Think of this as the computer equivalent of that scene.
Guy 1: Why don't I just poke him with the pointy bit
Great scene though, makes me want to watch the whole movie.
It includes powers like becoming weightless, killing with a single movement, flying, etc.
A friend just reminded me the same "battle of the minds" trope is used in Takeshi Kitano's version of "Zatoichi": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlVK7ogwyUI
You have a computer that you can only interact with over a radio link, and need to make it start working again with only what you know about how the system is built and a limited set of remote commands. Sounds like something I'd get obsessed with solving.
Confirming that not being able to ping/connect to it during the failed attempts was absolutely not exciting :)
Sigh.
pg down
Sigh
...
Repeat for hours.
And considering there are no life or death stakes, it still wouldn't be as exciting as Apollo 13.
This guy took about 30 hours of video of him porting an 80s version of unix to the ESP8266. Warts and all -- live!
I've started to watch it and it's fascinating!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDHcGY7EzUM&t=62s
You could have a whole channel with different teams debugging satellite technology and if you're bored, it would probably be quite interesting. The bigger problem is most likely concerns about IP and secret protocols and so on.
"And now Bob will log into TeleSat123 via SSH." <We see bob type in root / password123>
"Oups, uh..gosh we'll just go to a commercial break!"