Hacker News: 9659

New comment by 9659 in "Low-cost, portable device can detect colorectal and prostate cancer in an hour"

9659 — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 21:18:15 +0000

not blood, but the DNA of cancer cells. really.

New comment by 9659 in "Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) v4.0 is out [pdf]"

9659 — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 12:23:26 +0000

If your software kills someone (by mistake), personal guilt is a punishment one never completes.

New comment by 9659 in "Why the B-52 is outliving newer bombers [video]"

9659 — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 23:39:04 +0000

On paper, this all makes a lot of sense. What is going to happen when these airplanes start falling out of the sky because they are just too old?

50 years is a long time for a piece of machinery. There will be many failure modes that will be discovered in these planes.

The C-130 was thought to last forever. Until about 10 years ago, well used planes being used for firefighting starting having structural failure in flight. Suddenly, organizations flying the older airframes decided that it was no longer effective to take the risk of failure.

New comment by 9659 in "The military is an impossible place for hackers, and what to do about it (2018)"

9659 — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 20:46:21 +0000

USAF now has Cyber Warrant Officers.

New comment by 9659 in "COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

9659 — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 23:05:21 +0000

if gnat (the gnu ada translator) from NYU had come out 5 years earlier, ada might have caught on with the masses.

New comment by 9659 in "COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

9659 — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 02:04:36 +0000

yes, this is true. mainly due to a perceived lack of ada programmers on the market.

New comment by 9659 in "COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

9659 — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 21:37:41 +0000

Ada is an order of magnitude more modern and sophisticated than your other examples.

I expect Ada will capture 0.05% of the market for the next 100 years.

New comment by 9659 in "COBOL has been "dead" for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

9659 — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 21:35:43 +0000

This was almost true in 2000. It is not true now. Things change. Slowly.

New comment by 9659 in "OpenStreetMap's DevOps Efficiency: A Data-Driven Dora Metrics Analysis"

9659 — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 10:59:40 +0000

Just because it can be measured, doesn't mean it should be.

These 'measures' would be much more useful if they were used to determine the control limits of the software process being used.

'hours from pull request to merge' for an open source project is silly. who cares? 'number of commits a month'? who cares. what is the value of those commits.

why the focus on 'constant churn of software'? I don't see it.

New comment by 9659 in "Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair"

9659 — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 22:02:28 +0000

They do! The big platform OEM's have been saying no to extended tech data and source code access, but the smaller contracts require govt rights.

Either you give up your IP (drawings and source code) or you are non-compliant.

New comment by 9659 in "NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9"

9659 — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 19:39:02 +0000

The commercial aircraft part of McD was dead when the merger happened. The had a cash cow called the "MD-80", which was a derivative DC-9. That had stopped selling.

Boeing got more value out of the defense part of McD.

New comment by 9659 in "NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9"

9659 — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 19:36:38 +0000

s/some/most/

engineers on the bottom don't care about the politics. they design and implement the best they can.

New comment by 9659 in "NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9"

9659 — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 19:34:15 +0000

You can be great at one phase of your life. Motivating people, working 20 hours a day, sleeping in the office. Probably Tesla would have gone under without Elon pushing, motivating, and showing his investment (meaning of time and energy).

It doesn't mean you are a statesman, a scholar, or all knowing. About anything.

It also doesn't mean that you can solve every problem you encounter in life with that kind of behavour.

Tesla as a company is an impressive accomplishment. Elon does sound crazy, however.

New comment by 9659 in "NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9"

9659 — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 19:30:24 +0000

And thus WalterBright describes to us how VC's make money... risk and reward.

(Hi Walter. Love your posts...)

New comment by 9659 in "NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9"

9659 — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 19:27:16 +0000

SpaceX will lose a vehicle. Not a question of if, rather one of when.

relax! i am not saying Elon isn't the greatest engineer ever, and SpaceX is not a great company.

space flight is a dangerous business.

New comment by 9659 in "The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown"

9659 — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:22:35 +0000

many years ago, i was working as an electronic technician. we had a stack of processor boards (from a Perkin Elmer 7/32) that were removed from service. broken. many different revisions, and only schematics for one revision of each board. i thought it was hopeless. an older wiser tech taught me how.

plug a good board on an extender. run a diagnostic that fails in a loop. using a scope, look at every pin on the connector. write down what you see. replace with a bad board. repeat.

which signals are different? chase them back. if the schematic does not match, get out a voltmeter and your eyes and draw a schematic that reflects how the board is wired.

he called this "good card - bad card".

and it worked. not going to make any claims about cost effectiveness, but we fixed every board. and my troubleshooting skills in digital electronics were greatly improved.

this was a 'fireman' kind of job. waiting for the system to break, so it didn't matter if 2 techs put a week into 1 circuit board.

New comment by 9659 in "NASA is about to make its most important safety decision in nearly a generation"

9659 — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 22:39:17 +0000

space shuttle looked safe for the first 24 launches. not shilling for Boeing. just pointing out that space is dangerous. and a couple of successes does not make the risk go away.

New comment by 9659 in "NASA is about to make its most important safety decision in nearly a generation"

9659 — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 16:51:37 +0000

The SpaceX vehicle may look like the safest choice. But is it? A handful of manned flights does not prove that a vehicle is 'safe'. Likewise, some anomalies in 1 flight do not prove 'unsafe'.

Perhaps the knowledge of Starliner issues makes it more accurate to assess the risk.

Either vehicle could lose the crew on the return. "Astronauting" is a risky business.

I do not envy anyone on the decision chain.

New comment by 9659 in "Boeing Starliner could brick ISS docking port if crew abandons it"

9659 — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 16:21:50 +0000

incompetence and poor leadership is not a crime.

New comment by 9659 in "Translating All C to Rust (TRACTOR)"

9659 — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:37:40 +0000

target was x86_64 / linux. just updated the rpm spec file for the gcc build to enable ada. rebuild and install.

so, changed wordsize, processor, operating system... minimal source code impact.