6,342 karma · joined July 31, 2012
If I was going to be packing lots of data I'd probably use mopaq (.mpq) which has support for LZMA and Huffman coding.
If you've ever been up close to a museum fighter plane, they're in good shape. The leading edges are all smooth and polished, everything is sleek and in good condition. Line Hercs are not that. They're usually dented and covered in carbon from the exhausts. The leading edge of the wing is like three feet thick. It's a Mack truck with wings held aloft by furious amounts of horsepower.
It's dependable, reliable, and versatile. These things survive being shot at, being landed on gravel, ingesting birds into the intakes, ingesting sand into the intakes. You can start a Herc by putting another Herc in front of it and running the engines up so that the prop wash buddy-starts the aircraft behind, like bump-starting a car rolling downhill.
There are dozens of variants from the gunships to the EC-130 Compass Call and friends which carry serious business ELINT gear for secret squirrels to do secret squirrel shit with. You can put RATO pods on it. You can use it for SAR. You can drop bombs from it (and not even by throwing them out the ramp, which you could also do). You can use it to refuel fighters and helicopters aerially. You can put skis on it and land it in the show. You can parachute from it. It's not a jet, but despite being a draggy brick of an aircraft it'll still pull almost 0.6 of Mach while carrying two hummvees. Also, those hummvees can parachute from the aircraft.
There's a reason it's so widely-used [0] and that reason is because the Herc is groovy. It's the unsung hero of nearly every military operation carried out by NATO and friends since the 1960s.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Lockheed_C-130_Hercule...
Certainly there are companies that the military wants to buy from. For all the shit about the F-35, Lockheed Martin probably employs some of the greatest engineering teams on the planet.
The C-130, for example, is probably one of if not the greatest aircraft ever designed.
Anyways, there are certain companies that make things militaries want to buy, but for more mundane things like computers and pens and chairs, either there's a negotiated standing offer that legally has to be the first point of procurement, or it goes out to contracts. Unfortunately winning government contracts is a bit of a skill in and of itself and some firms have that skill and others don't.
You'll eventually learn that every online community has its own particular brand of bias and implicit editorial slant, if you will.
HN is no exception. There are certain topics that are simply not kosher here, irrespective of what people say.
The sooner you make your peace with that the better.
I do low-freq stat arb and it's modestly profitable. I just use IBKR's API, their snapshot data, and postgres. Nothing fancy.
Feel free to shoot me an email, it's in my profile.
Also nobody that knows what they're doing uses "duct tape" on ducts, so the name is pretty meaningless.
It's not just a mild annoyance, it's a sad statement about python as a community of developers that this is not only accepted but recommended.
I write python because some of what I do occurs in the domains where python makes the most sense, but the idea that the python community accepts venv rather than considering the fact that venv even exists at all to be a source of profound embarassment is mystifying to me.
There's no Schrodinger's Burglar. You've been robbed once I take your wallet, whether you've discovered it or not.
None of the SCIFs I've been in had TEMPEST gear.
Same. It felt freeing to just say "fuck it, I'll use a struct" and have the built-ins required to automagically marshall json on the wire to structs in memory. That was pretty cool. You're spawning threads^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgoroutines and passing messages and not giving a fuck because the language protects you.
Then I wanted to make v2 of my package.
Go's packaging (and module) system is just so indescribably, generally, and thoroughly bad that it put me off the language and I won't be back. I spent more time fucking around with dependencies and wondering why `go get` was giving me cryptic and unhelpful errors that were unaddressed by the docs than I did writing my code.
Deleting go was the best move I've made.
>For a SW person, heck, there is always something that must be mastered, and pronto. Unless a SW person can kick back and write COBOL all day, there is much more to learn and apply to problem solutions. SW is fundamentally more demanding.
Surely you jest. From what I can see the "always something that must be mastered and pronto" is simply javascript kids justifying their inflated salaries by rewriting their codebases in new frameworks every few months only to rediscover bad solutions to problems that were solved a decade ago.
If your design is so precious to you, you can use flash or DRM or something similar so nobody can copy your design quite as easily, but this is a disappointing attitude to see.
One can dream.