nycdotnet

The 2038 bug is less than 14 years away at this point. There is an astonishingly greater amount of software out there compared with 24 years ago. I don’t want to be a doomsayer but it’s probably time to keep this in mind anytime you implement an epoch going forward.

The space shuttle had three main components - the orbiter (white and black space plane with the crew and cargo), the external tank (rust brown on all but the first few flights), and a pair of solid rocket boosters. The orbiter had three engines and received its propellant (oxygen and hydrogen) from the external tank. At launch, the solid rocket boosters (SRB) and the main engines were all running so technically they can all be considered part of a “first stage”. The SRBs would expend their propellant in around two minutes and separate. They dropped into the ocean, slowed via parachute, and were recovered by boat and refurbished. The three space shuttle main engines would continue to burn for several more minutes until the external tank was depleted. The ET would be discarded and burn up on reentry. Then the orbiter would use two small rockets with internally stored hypergolic propellants to boost up to its intended orbit.

Apollo/Saturn had a much more traditional staging design where the first stage booster would run then drop off, then the second stage booster would run, then drop off, etc. There exist other rockets like the Atlas which had what they called a “stage and a half” design where the center stage burned for a long time and there was an outer “ring” stage that dropped off after a shorter time while the center stage kept going.

After going to the moon, the only part of the entire Apollo/Saturn rocket that came back was the command module capsule with the astronauts and moon rocks. These were completely torched and affected by salt water and were not designed to be reused. Reentry from the moon is significantly faster than reentry from low earth orbit.

The shuttle orbiters were refurbished and reused. It was a very difficult, expensive, and time consuming process to get an orbiter ready for another flight.

All of that is to say that the picture is blurry for the shuttle regarding first stage reusability. Yes the SRBs and orbiters were reused and were lit at launch. The ET was in use at launch but discarded. In my opinion it’s sort of not that interesting to argue what is and isn’t first stage on the shuttle because the elements just don’t map cleanly.

The design of the system with the SRBs, tank, and orbiters being adjacent to each other is considered by many to have been too dangerous in retrospect. This design was a factor in both shuttle disasters - the SRB shooting fire at the ET causing it to explode on Challenger and cracked foam falling away from the ET during launch and hitting the leading edge of the orbiter wing for Columbia. If they were stacked vertically rather than adjacent, those specific failure modes would not have been possible.

Same Apollo company where original version of uuid came from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifie...

StackOverflow runs on SQL Server.

Ian Bogost is more of an essayist than a journalist. His magnum opus is his analysis of the blue shell in Mario Kart. https://bogost.com/writing/blue-shell-discontents/

Hi - can Grace support partial commits somehow? Such as if I want to check in part of a file but not other parts? This is a key feature of Git for my workflows but doesn’t seem to be plausible at all if files are pushed up on save. Unless this would be part of “promote requests” only?

Starliner is specced to be able to boost the ISS. Dragon (today) can not.

“The garbage comes from somewhere” -David Fowler

This sounds right. This JSONB seems to be oriented not around semantic parsing, just structural parsing. https://sqlite.org/draft/jsonb.html

Note too that JSON doesn’t really have ints or floats - the number type in JSON doesn’t specify a max size. Most implementations of course do rely on the native number types of their platform, so this implementation choice for SQLite allows them to keep a simpler implementation that sidesteps a lot of complexity that would come from deeper parsing.

See the number section on json.org https://www.json.org/json-en.html

Nice work. I did a little “cheat sheet” a while back which has some Kubernetes and even Windows containers stuff too. Always interesting what parts of systems different developers use based on their requirements. https://github.com/nycdotnet/docker-cheat-sheet

I have a hard time getting a React project from a few years ago to `npm install`.

> Staying on course can be a challenge when feedback starts to challenge the solutions you’re building

Ignoring all the negative feedback was hard, but we pulled it off!!!

This is a pretty cool article but calling the Voyagers “obsolete” is killer comedy. Ok yes and what non-obsolete technology has passed the heliopause and can be patched from 130/160 AU away.

This is the same reason a point is 1/72 on an inch - many factors make convenient typesetting.

If you don't mind a fictional space-related API, check out https://spacetraders.io/

This is a profoundly dumb summary of the referenced research article - rather astonishing for UCLA.

Studying the boulder swarm - amazing! Saying the boulders that came off are like shrapnel from a hand grenade - sure. Observing that the boulders keep the relative velocity of the original body and that they could cause damage if they hit something... ok yeah? Interplanetary velocities are energetic - true - and that this is similar to the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb - technically true also, but this is where it veers into sensationalism.

It's rather telling that this part is put as "Jewitt said" but not quoted. This could very mean that Jewitt said it would have X amount of energy, and the author decided to put in the nuclear bomb angle because it was a similar energy.

Asteroids this size just burn up. "In theory" they could hit something in orbit but space is mind-bogglingly huge and this is exceedingly unlikely. And weighed against surface impact of something judged worthy of a planetary defense scenario?

Unanticipated risks?

needs to be said as a question. Passport?

Who could have predicted that the key element to break the hegemony of 0 and 1 is ha(l)fnium.

The TypeScript language service which powers IDEs and which is maintained/shipped with TypeScript already has the knowledge of all the types in your application. It seems like it would be relatively straight-forward (though a lot of work!) to develop some sort of code gen library that uses the TypeScript types known to the language service to reflect on those types and emit some sort of runtime type validation functions as part of a build step. This could be done in an npm module similar to webpack or in an IDE plugin. If that functionality doesn't exist today given all the listed open source projects, I'm kind of surprised. I don't think the TypeScript team would need to do anything to allow such a project to be developed.

same with C#

With all the talk about failure modes of carbon fiber, the scariest part of this article is the photo of the display and light held up by screws drilled into the side of the pressure vessel.

My favorite ArcServe bug which they released a patch for (and which didn’t actually fix the issue, as I recall) had a KB article called something along the lines of “The Open Database Backup Agent for Lotus Notes Cannot Backup Open Databases”.

If you’re backing up a db or something sure, but for a file server this can be just as important as the data itself (ex: now everyone can read HR’s personnel files which had strict permissions before)

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When they came out with the “basketball with the tiny pump in it”, Wilson touted it as a big deal for inner city kids. This seems an effort along the same theme.

look for “D&D Encounters” in your area. This is very common in game stores and they’re designed for drop-in players or first timers to try out D&D. This is how I got back into D&D 10 years back after not having played since the early ‘90s.

Looks awesome. One fundamental issue I always faced with Excel calculations of any kind (formulas or vba) is the lack of ability to source control cleanly (binary format plus data and code are intermingled). This weakness is the other side of the spreadsheet’s greatest strength which is low friction experimentation with data. Does this product attempt to do anything here?

Not using reflection also allows safer code trimming.

https://hedy.org has text to speech built-in and is meant to help kids learn to program.

I didn't really understand HTTP until I started using Fiddler which was probably 10 years after I had written my first web server application. "What do you mean I can't change the headers because they've already been sent?"