Hacker News: timschmidt

New comment by timschmidt in "SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites"

timschmidt — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:26:53 +0000

It's always a good laugh when I run into some old comment or video talking like this about Falcon. Thunderfoot is a hoot.

New comment by timschmidt in "SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites"

timschmidt — Mon, 11 May 2026 02:28:29 +0000

Agreed. They're already stretching starship. And there's long been talk of a wider version yet. Starship is already pretty impressive considering it's just about exactly the size of Sea Dragon.

New comment by timschmidt in "SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites"

timschmidt — Mon, 11 May 2026 02:26:36 +0000

I checked the publicly released stats over Starship's development, and this is what I found: compared with the initial ~5,000 t / ~73.5 MN concept, the latest V3-class Starship/Super Heavy is trending toward roughly 35%+ more loaded propellant mass and about 40% more maximum liftoff thrust if you use the FAA’s ~103 MN figure. Payload capability has also moved upward from the early 100+ t reusable LEO baseline to SpaceX’s current public claim of up to 150 t fully reusable and 250 t expendable.

When I plug those numbers into https://www.aerovia.org/tools/rocket-equation I get Delta-Vs in the 28k km/hr range right where I'd expect for orbit.

You got a different rocket equation?

New comment by timschmidt in "SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites"

timschmidt — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:51:06 +0000

I don't see any reason a non-renewable Starship upper stage would kill the economics of the vehicle. No one else has a renewable upper stage yet, so there's no competition in that space until someone else does. Stoke have an interesting design but it hasn't flown yet and is only about the size of Falcon.

If they do manage to reuse the upper stage, then they should have no problem exceeding falcon launch cadence. Starship is much easier to build than Falcon. Welding is simpler and less expensive than the carbon composites used on Falcon upper stages.

New comment by timschmidt in "SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites"

timschmidt — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:27:40 +0000

The 160 launches figure includes falcons. Seems like Starship fuels and flight tests faster than Falcon though. And if they manage to reuse second stages, then that eliminates a significant manufacturing bottleneck.

New comment by timschmidt in "SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites"

timschmidt — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:16:00 +0000

They've been approved for 44 Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and are aiming for 160 total launches in 2026. They've recently purchased a giant tract of land in Louisana to build a third starport. 222/year is looking doable.

New comment by timschmidt in "SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites"

timschmidt — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:09:34 +0000

They seem to have constructed a rocket with 10x the payload to LEO of the one they used to put those 10k satellites in orbit, and even demonstrated payload deployment. So I'd say 100k looks do-able for them today.

10x that seems aspirational, but not comically so. Folks hate Musk, but that seems to cause them to not see the engineering going on in front of them.

New comment by timschmidt in "SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites"

timschmidt — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:42:04 +0000

SpaceX has consistently launched ~90% of the mass to orbit for the whole planet Earth over the last several years[1][2]. There's no one else who could more credibly make such a claim.

1: https://officechai.com/stories/spacex-launched-85-of-all-glo... 2: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/05/spacex-launching-87-90...

New comment by timschmidt in "Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected"

timschmidt — Sun, 10 May 2026 05:22:50 +0000

It's really amazing how much more connected the world was not very long ago. Take a look at 24k years ago here: https://sea-level.vercel.app/ Nearly every continent is one connected landmass. And all the most prime real estate is now under water.

New comment by timschmidt in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

timschmidt — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:39:31 +0000

I hear you. I think we are already seeing some middle ground with agentic systems using RAG, skills.md files, etc. It's a sort of disassociated card catalog memory. An engineer's notebook. Not the integrated, correlated, pre-processed set of relationships in the model. How to go backward from the notebook -> model cheaply without tanking performance is definitely one of those billion dollar questions.

New comment by timschmidt in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

timschmidt — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:33:51 +0000

They can form new associations between concepts via their input prompts and thinking text. That is a form of learning. Just not very durable. I liken it to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia

New comment by timschmidt in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

timschmidt — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:53:13 +0000

It's been pretty clear in my experience that experts tend to be capable of working with the same ideas in many different forms. That's what I would call mastery. It implies "complete" knowledge, which probably means several interrelated encodings with loci in different parts of the brain. Those interrelated encodings will be highly associated, and discerning in an expert. Which implies a high degree of usefulness and specificity in communication. This matches my experience.

New comment by timschmidt in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

timschmidt — Thu, 07 May 2026 22:21:57 +0000

No, it really doesn't presume anything about brains or information encoding. Just points out that there is a level of mastery in which all the techniques and all the forms have names or adequate descriptions. Teachers often attempt to achieve this, to facilitate education.

New comment by timschmidt in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

timschmidt — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:18:06 +0000

I think there's a level above that where the words to describe such structure are familiar and readily available and hey guess what? The model understands those too. Just about every pattern has a name. Or a shape. Or an analog or metaphor in other languages or codebases. All work as descriptors.

New comment by timschmidt in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

timschmidt — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:11:26 +0000

It turns out an awful lot of precision (plenty for many things) lives in library and web APIs, documentation, header files and dependency manifests. Language can literally just point at it without repeating it all. Avoidance of mistake through elimination of manual copying in things like actuarial and ballistics tables was what the original computers were built for.

New comment by timschmidt in "Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected"

timschmidt — Sat, 02 May 2026 14:47:53 +0000

Here's a review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773...

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1411762111

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08769-7

https://www.academia.edu/9737879/Land_Beneath_the_Waves_Subm...

https://pure.york.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/under-the-sea...

New comment by timschmidt in "Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected"

timschmidt — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:55:53 +0000

Yes, polar regions are reliably colder than equatorial regions. Lytton, BC hit the temperature you cite for one day on Tuesday, June 29, 2021. That's a sign of warming, and we should expect more warm days than in the past at any given lattitude. But it is not evidence against the general case that polar regions have colder climates than equatorial regions.

Here's a citation demonstrating that over the last 95 million years if you need one: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111332119

One more just for fun: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/12/4/1520-04...

New comment by timschmidt in "Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected"

timschmidt — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:20:48 +0000

It's a problem anywhere that temperatures reach that high. Higher latitudes have colder climates. Hence, not a problem. If it becomes a problem, people move toward the poles. No longer a problem.

Earth would have to experience > +35 to +50C for the poles to be uninhabitable due to heat.

New comment by timschmidt in "Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected"

timschmidt — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:45:38 +0000

> Our bodies won't be able to handle a temperature regime that hot overall. The factor to research is Wet Bulb Temperature Effect.

That's a problem at the Equator, but not at the higher latitudes.

New comment by timschmidt in "Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected"

timschmidt — Fri, 01 May 2026 07:57:28 +0000

Certain investment firms purchased cold-weather ports which were iced in 8 months a year, 20 years ago, which now operate nearly year-round.