patrickyeon

Part of me feels the same, but (in NHL overtimes at least) I've also heard that injuries become progressively more common per time played as games stretch into longer and longer overtimes. That seems worth avoiding.

You're absolutely right that it depends on pricing, assuming what they offer has the technical capabilities to do what a customer needs. But how they calculate that 80% matters too, and if it's measured against a more "traditional" groundstation contract I'd say that's also being misleading.

I've seen new turn-key installations come with an equivalent UI and an API to match it. Plus a bunch of debugging/calibration/testing controls. And then (assuming licensing, real estate, and services availability) you get to drop that "anywhere" and optimize its geographical location to match up with your system requirements.

Turn-key systems will totally let you specialize it to maximize utility. Selection of RF feeds/hardware on the input side, and eg. hardware data modems and co-located command-and-control servers on the output side.

At a glance, that's offering funding for commoditized satellite busses (the infrastructure of a physical satellite) and payloads, so none of that goes to the groundlink. I'd also suggest that this funding offer is trailing the direction that the community is headed, as opposed to leading it. There are all kinds of players trying to do this.

Not as well as intuition suggests. Deep space is cold, but also the sun (and reflected energy from the Earth!) is pretty hot. Without air, there's no convection so it's all radiated energy transfer, so you're limited by how much surface area you can "point at" deep space while not also pointing it at the sun.

I'm... not convinced this is a decent offering. At the same time, I'm repeatedly wrong with this whole cloud computing, so maybe I'm just that person stuck with the old ways and telling everyone else they're doing it wrong.

But it seems like a recipe that combines so many of the worst parts of running a groundstation. The setup can't easily be specialized enough to really milk capability (say, different ways to correct pointing and orbit determination errors that need more direct control of the antenna than just feeding a TLE), but it's likely so general that there's still significant engineering effort for anybody who wants to use it. If you want to do anything requiring round-trips to the satellite, where you need to ship raw radio signals to a DC, process them in software to demodulate and decode, then encode and modulate your responce before shipping it back as raw radio signals to the groundstation, sorry but that latency is painful and hurts you on link utilization.

In comparison, buying a small turn-key dish and operating it is not that bad. Paying per-minute or per-pass gets really expensive for smallsat/cubesat operators, at least at the usual prices I've seen and compared to the operating cost of equipment you own. Also, if you're just running a tech demo then it's not exactly prohibitive to partner with somebody who has excess capacity.

I think this offering is missing the mark. If I had to make an analogy, I'd say they're offering roughly "GCP for downlink" to a world that's not quite homogeneous enough for it to make sense. If I were trying to do this, I'd be aiming to be the "Squarespace of downlink" (more tightly scoped capabilities, but much better performance and more turn-key) or someone delivering groundstation-in-a-box kits.

Context: I used to work at Planet Labs, having spent considerable time collaborating with the groundstations team, as well as some collaboration with the missions ops team.

I don't buy it, wrt recommending something already purchased. If the one thing you know about someone is a specific book (or other purchase people tend to only make one of) they bought, it's a decent assumption that they are more likely to buy literally anything else from you.

gwern has a very involved post on archiving as well, https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs

Somewhere on my to-do list is archiving everything I visit on the internet. It's frustrating to know that I've seen something, but be unable to find it again.

I think this is a "the journey is its own reward" type of story. The author is interested in sharing the "how" of sleuthing around.

Without getting into the conspiracy-ish side of this, I'd like to point out that this is changing. Until recently, I worked at Planet Labs where our goal was to image the entire landmass of the Earth, at 3m resolution (not quite as good as Google's most zoomed-in imagery), every day and make it available to everyone. The monitoring system design means, amongst other wins, we don't need to know "something is about to change" to get the before/after pictures, and it also prevents the "checkbook shutter control" the article talks about.

You can sign up for an account[0] with just an email address and start digging through imagery right now (unfortunately, purchasing it at full quality is a different story). Make sure to select an Area Of Interest to get down to daily imagery, I'll start you off with one for the Tonopah Test Range[1] which has coverage on 21 different days so far in October.

[0] https://www.planet.com/explorer/ [1] https://www.planet.com/explorer/#/area-coverage/0.32,1/mosai...

Sure, where "fixed on NYMags end" means "NYMags has implemented a workaround because FB broke things".

This is breaking some links. You might believe it "shouldn't", and a server "should" ignore the added params, but the reality is it's breaking them. This past weekend, I posted a link to an image on Facebook, and FB generated the preview fine, but created a link that 404's.

My link: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg

Facebook made: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg?fbclid=IwAR2...

I guess if FB really wants, they could make a second fetch to ensure that their added params don't break the third party server. Or could they add a whitelist of domains that use their first-party tracking?

I really don't like the end result right now, looking like "the web works" from inside FB, but not when you try to follow this link out of it. I don't believe at all that that is FB's intent here, but it's just one more time that some silo breaks another part of the ecosystem, and to an untrained eye it looks like the third party is the culprit.

I got caught this weekend where I linked an image on Facebook, and it generated the preview properly but the link is broken because the host 404's with the added fbclid parameter.

I entered: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg

Facebook made: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Byv5uWSIIAEf38C.jpg?fbclid=IwAR2...

So sure, there may be an argument that the server should ignore that param. But it's absolutely false to say it "isn't breaking anything".

I have no special knowledge about this, but Chipworks is a well-respected Ottawa (Ontario, Canada) company that has been doing silicon-level reverse engineering and teardowns for a while. It looks like they're part of TechInsights now, but seems like the right kind of crew to be doing this.

See eg. some silicon analysis on the iPhone 7 http://www.techinsights.com/about-techinsights/overview/blog...

A while ago, I ended up watching a video about making roofing shingles using hand tools, which uses the same technique, but on only ~footlong logs.

https://youtu.be/UZA1J8RHltY?t=555

A few years ago, I saw a classroom video (I would guess ~8-10 year olds, in the American public school system) as a demonstration of a teacher's technique called "my favourite wrong answer". She would have them solve a problem (a math problem, in this particular case), collect the answers, show the distribution of the answers, and then pick out one answer (possibly with the student's name redacted) as her "favourite wrong answer". And then she would work through why she liked it so much with the students. In the examples, it was cases where the person was on the right track, but then made an incorrect, but justifiable by _some_ standard, step in solving it.

It seemed like a good way to really try to understand where someone's comprehension broke down. It felt like it added some legitimacy to the students who got the answer wrong, if others could look at it and go "oh, I see why you thought that!" instead of just "wow try to get it right next time". I believe it's part of what good teachers (not limited to school educators, mind you) are doing all the time: looking for the student's gaps and trying to correct those, instead of just repeating the lesson that has already failed to stick.

I guess this just makes me think of that teacher, trying to work out what her pupils were misunderstanding, by looking at their answers.

I mean... in 2016 1.2% of Americans were "American Indian", so outside of that small group everyone is "clearly immigrants or the descendants of immigrants".

It's pretty bad form to look at names and assume that someone isn't an American.

Why do you believe any of those names are not American?

Sounds like you should "just" target whichever one is easier (cheaper) to pull CO2 out of, then.

OK. But why was one rigged with explosives carried on a commercial passenger flight? I think it was going out for a demo, but surely it didn't need the explosives set up for the travel part of that trip?

Because you didn't do the math yourself, 40 miles per hour is just shy of 18 meters per second. So 120 meters is almost 6.7 seconds at that constant speed (more if you're slowing down). Start of video to collision is less than 5 seconds.

That's a different Swarm. The one making satellites is http://www.swarm-technologies.com/

The rest of what you said is correct though: the FCC has jurisdiction because the company being discussed is an American one.

NPR's Planet Money did an episode on the Valentine's Day rose craziness. I don't recall it being about particularly offside tactics, but it's from three years ago.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/13/386005044/epis...

I don't know if that's as much as you think it is. Vi's actually pretty forward with what some of those costs are on her Patreon page there, and in calling the goal of $10,000 "sustainability". If I were to throw some very rough numbers, I'd guess at 10% of that going to payment processing (iirc, Patreon takes 5%, paypal/stripe would be at 3-5%?), which would leave 81,000/yr. 24,000 to tax, and we're down to 4,750/mo.

Internet, piano loan, and rent are 2,650 as per Vi's Patreon pledge amounts. So, 2,100/mo for the rest of life's costs (and if you're not used to seeing the cost, remember that health insurance is not cheap in the US), as well as the costs of material and equipment for her work. I'll point out that "sustainability" as her Patreon goal still involves counting on Amazon wishlist gifts to provide the equipment she wants/needs, and this is before we talk about savings or other such adult things.

It's great that she's getting Patreon income (and probably Youtube ad income)! I really would love to see amazing creators supported in such a way more often. We should just be careful when reading the Patreon top line number that we don't compare it to our bottom line on a pay stub.

(Planet employee here) Planet imaging happens in the late morning, because that's when we tend to get clearer atmosphere, relatively short shadows, but minimal specular-like reflection of sunlight. This event happened in early evening (I think the aircraft was first spotted on radar around 4.30 PM) so we won't have any imagery of it. We'd have more luck if we could guess at a location it would be in the morning, and we had reason to believe it was parked out in the open.

Any guesses? Does anyone want to dig into something like flightradar24 records and see if something took off with a transponder then disappeared that day?

The comment is that you can no longer assume net neutrality. Under the assumption that your ISP does the equivalent of bundling television channels, you'd have end users look at their "package options" and go "no, of course I won't pay you an extra 10$/mo for Facebook with ads". GP is looking forward to the Schadenfreude.

It's neat to look at the two pictures:

Rob is holding up a bag of Soylent, presenting it to the reader, bag in focus Rob considerably out of focus. Background is hard to make out, maybe a lag, kitchen, or kitchen-lab?

Bryan is sitting at a table, clearly in a situation where he's "on display" (jacket, microphone, earpiece), face well-lit. The product is in front of him, almost as out of focus as Rob is in the first photo. In fact, although the bottles are branded, you can more easily make out the Soylent logo on Bryan's shirt even though it's folded than you can on the bottles.

I'm just saying, if this were a movie I know what the message the director/DP would be trying to convey is: Rob was all about being the CEO who invented Soylent and brought it to the world. He makes a bag of powder the star of the photo of himself. Now it's Bryan's time, where the focus of the CEO's office is the CEO: Bryan.

Of course, this is not a movie. They're probably saying a lot less than that with their photo choices in real life.

So first, why does that not seem like the right way to you? Paying per-play is generally how I would expect broadcast/performance payments to work.

The bigger problem though, is that's not how it works. You may expect those two artists to split your 10$ (ignoring everybody else's cut for simplicity), but what actually happens is the sum total of the revenue that Spotify gets in a month is split up across all of the plays that month[0].

So what actually happens is the two artists you've streamed get paid a few pennies out of your subscription fee, and the rest of it goes to subsidize the streams of other people (heavy users, and/or business that leave it playing all day).

[0]: https://www.stereogum.com/1587932/spotify-explains-royalty-p...

I don't agree on that. Of course, if someone wants to bypass a puzzle they can, but that's not the spirit in which I read the "no tutorials or hint systems" bit. What he's really offering is the option for the player to elect to never see hints and training, and puting the constraint on himself that he has to use gameplay and good design to explain the problems and not beat you over the head with the solution.

I believe his goal is not to make it more fun by making the "finished this game" more exclusive, but rather make it more fun by designing it to be intrinsically fun for the audience he's targetting.

That's definitely a cynical way (that I would tend to lean towards agreeing with) to describe it.

The other spin would be "we discovered illegal activity through evidence that would be inadmissible in court, so we went ahead and focussed on gathering admissible evidence". Probably by looking in places they wouldn't have looked otherwise, but not by making anything up or breaking any laws.

Oona may have put 'hacker' in scare quotes as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the spec that she quotes in the article, but browse around her page a bit and you'll see that she is easily deserving of the title.