There are cases where you do know that those don't change as fast or that the actual core of your software needs a fundamental rewrite anyway to pivot. Think about number crunching or comparable small software.
I'm sorry, where are you getting this from? That seems contradictory to common knowledge in this subject, and if you want to do a silly thing like label certain behaviors "liberal" or "conservative" in the context of U.S. politics.
Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just relaying what the research says. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal..... There are other studies that electromagnetically impair amygdala function which induced hyper empathy and atheism in the lab, but sadly I haven’t been able to find them again on Google.
Public opinion is swayed by the large volume of articles like these, and public opinion is important when you're running a high end, large scale b2c enterprise while making an emotional appeal that buying your product is something they should feel good about for their contribution to pushing the world in a better direction.
>there are plenty of ACH/SWIFT transfers that are actually just people moving money from account to account or institution to institution too, rather than actual inter-party transactions.
You're transferring banking systems/locations. That affects money supply, transfer fee's, lending, etc. It definitely has an economic impact, far larger than transferring bitcoins around.
>"Zuma" satellite is the third payload sitting on a Falcon 9 that has been lost in four years. By way of comparison, United Launch Alliance, SpaceX's sole competitor in the military launch business, hasn't lost a single payload in 12 years and 124 missions.
>two recent government reports raise questions bearing upon the reliability of SpaceX products and processes. The first is an evaluation of quality controls among launch-vehicle suppliers to the military space program. That report, prepared by the defense department's Inspector General and dated December 20, found 181 deviations from quality standards at contractor sites. Over a third were "major nonconformities," meaning deviations that might contribute to a failure in quality controls.
Okay how does that negate the other payload losses that SpaceX has had, with only half the number of launches as its competitor? SpaceX has 61 launches according to this: http://www.spacex.com/missions
You've totally missed the point.
Haha, and then you edited your comment to attack the source. Honestly the person could have been North Korea's super extra special space dictator and it wouldn't change the reality that SpaceX has a higher incident rate than comparable companies. Which is what OP basically asked.
ULA is indeed remarkably reliable — that is its main advantage, given its high prices. However, ULA is only the sole competitor to SpaceX in military launch — for commercial and NASA launches several other alternatives exist. Let's take a more thorough review:
• Proton-M: 9 failures and 2 partial failures in 102 launches.
• Ariane 5: 2 failures and 3 partial failures in 98 launches
• Antares: 1 failure in 8 launches (this is SpaceX's competitor in NASA resupply launches)
• Pegasus (smallsats): 3 failures and 2 partial failures in 43 launches. Derivative Minotaur-C had 3 failures in 10 launches.
• Falcon: 1 failure, 1 partial failure, and 1 non-launch payload loss (Amos-6) in 58 launches (59 campaigns).
SpaceX's failure rate is in line with industry norms.
While ULA has a perfect safety record since it was formed in 2006, its rockets do not (though they are still impressive).
• Atlas V: 1 partial failure in 78 launches.
• Delta IV: 1 partial failure in 36 launches.
>two recent government reports raise questions bearing upon the reliability of SpaceX products and processes. The first is an evaluation of quality controls among launch-vehicle suppliers to the military space program. That report, prepared by the defense department's Inspector General and dated December 20, found 181 deviations from quality standards at contractor sites. Over a third were "major nonconformities," meaning deviations that might contribute to a failure in quality controls.
Bizarrely, the author here attributes nonconformities at all three EELV contractors — including ULA and Aerojet Rocketdyne — to SpaceX. The actual breakdown:
>SpaceX's failure rate is in line with industry norms.
SpaceX's 93% launch success rate is still below average for ALL launches (94-95%), and has a higher incident rate than its "competitors" in any form. That's what was asked. You don't need to apologize for SpaceX.
Some of the rockets in your "thorough" have radically different missions, specifications, and costs than the type of rockets we're discussing. Let's talk about what we're actually comparing. Orbital launch rockets actually beat "industry" averages by a signification margin. And let's talk about failures, unrecoverable ones.
* Altas V (actually built by Lockheed Martin, not ULA): 98% successful launch rate.
* Delta (entire family): 99% success rate across the ENTIRE family.
* H-IIA: 98% success rate
* Araine 5: 98% success rate.
* Long March (entire family): 98-99% success rate.
See a pattern? All of the above families have mission histories of 100+ launches.
>the author here attributes nonconformities at all three EELV contractors — including ULA and Aerojet Rocketdyne — to SpaceX
No they didn't. Are you just purposefully misreading the article?
>The first is an evaluation of quality controls among launch-vehicle suppliers to the military space program.
>at contractor sites.
Beyond reading comprehension differences, I am not interested in willfully misrepresenting basic facts as some sort of intellectual jerk off exercise. SpaceX is below the industry average and way below the launch success average for the type of work they're doing. That's what the OP asked.
Then why is spaceX at 93%? 2 unrecoverable failures in 59 campaigns equals 96.6% success.
All the competitors you listed have roots in government space programs going back many decades. Rockets tend to have a lot of "infant mortality" that those programs are way past.
Also, some of your claims are value/wrong: the Delta and Long March families are very large and very old and if you count the earliest attempts of governments to build ICBMs you get reliability figures worse than SpaceX.
Conversely the H-IIA, Delta 4, Atlas 5, Ariane 5 have fewer than 100 launches each.
>the Delta and Long March families are very large and very old and if you count the earliest attempts of governments to build ICBMs you get reliability figures worse than SpaceX.
"If you do this thing that you didn't do, you get worse figures."
Do you mean originally? ULA is a 50/50 joint venture that Boeing and Lockheed Martin were forced into after almost corporate-espionaging themselves into oblivion. It owns, operates, and manufactures the factories and rockets that each company used to provide independently — Delta from Boeing and Atlas from Lockheed.
>SpaceX's 93% launch success rate is still below average for ALL launches (94-95%), and has a higher incident rate than its "competitors" in any form. That's what was asked. You don't need to apologize for SpaceX.
How do you get to this number? Even in the least charitable way to calculate it, excluding Falcon Heavy, using Amos in the numerator but not the denominator, and counting the secondary payload loss on CRS-1, Falcon 9's failure rate is 3/57. That's 5.2%, or a success rate of 94.74%.
>Some of the rockets in your "thorough" have radically different missions, specifications, and costs than the type of rockets we're discussing. Let's talk about what we're actually comparing. Orbital launch rockets actually beat "industry" averages by a signification margin. And let's talk about failures, unrecoverable ones.
Zero of those rockets are non-orbital. The only one not in Falcon 9's class is Pegasus (though the TESS mission was intended for Minotaur). Ariane and Proton are Falcon's main competitors in the commercial market, where ULA is uncompetitive.
>See a pattern?
Yes, designs tend to get safer as they mature. Falcon is at 58 launches and is likely to exceed 80 before any crewed launch. Its last failure was mission #29.
>All of the above families have mission histories of 100+ launches.
Counting 'family' legacy back to ICBMs is ludicrous. Atlas V has flown 78 times, Delta IV 36 times (Medium and Heavy), H-IIA 39 times.
And can you cite those family success rates? The Thor/Delta family, by a quick calculation per Wikipedia's launch lists[0], has an 87.42% success rate.[1]
>No they didn't. Are you just purposefully misreading the article?
No, but the article's author is purposefully misleading readers by citing that number alone:
>Against that backdrop, two recent government reports raise questions bearing upon the reliability of SpaceX products and processes. The first is an evaluation of quality controls among launch-vehicle suppliers to the military space program. That report, prepared by the defense department's Inspector General and dated December 20, found 181 deviations from quality standards at contractor sites.
Moreover, ULA rockets consist of both ULA and Aerojet Rocketdyne parts (and indeed RL10 caused Atlas' partial failure). If we're correlating nonconformities with risk, their numbers should be added together. And, of course, the inspector general didn't evaluate RD-180 production facilities.
You can click on each rocket and look at the launch history. I am again, done with this conversation because of how disingenuous you are willing to be.
>You would have to show that people are not investing because they have no extra money and not that they are choosing to use their money now instead of investing.
We know they don't have enough money to invest. Average income + average cost of living < amount needed to safely invest.
We've quite literally known about if for years on a national scale. He doesn't have to show anything.
I am not victim blaming, I am pointing out a way that the "broken system" has failed to educate people about the problem. You also can't just cite the average cost of living as if that it is a standard that has no waste in it. We need to do a better job of framing things like "if you switch to a worse phone plan and save $10 per month to invest, you will probably have something around $30,000 in 30 years while only investing $3,600.".
I edited my comment to remove the statement "Stop blaming people for a system they didn't choose." I'm sorry you read it. It was unnecessary and you're right, you're not really victim blaming.
I got frustrated at face value because increasing wages would do more to alleviate a lot of American's financial woe's -- now and later -- than (rightfully) helping to educate Americans about investing money. You're right, even small bouts of investment can net large gains in the future. I jumped the gun and took it as "if you just stopped being dumb with money everything would be better!"
Wage increases are not only largely (historically) objectively justifiable, but wage increases would be more consistent and easier to "implement" than educating an entire populace in a better manner. There would also be the enormous task of changing purchasing habits. We know that even when people understand "doing X is bad for future results", that doesn't mean they'll make the more rational choice.
Neither perspective is exclusive. We can increase wages and we should also invest in educating Americans about sound financial practices. But wage increases can happen now, would be immediately beneficial to everyone, while also making it easier to invest and take on the risks associated with investing.
I sincerely appreciate this reply. Not enough people are willing to do to what you just did.
I agree with everything else you said here. More money is always going to be the quickest and simplest fix for this. I was simply pointing out that financial education should also be part of an ideal solution and that education alone is "better than nothing."
I appreciate the spirit of this comment too. I do think though that where many well-intentioned people go wrong is that they think wages are just like a dial that "we" (or gov or whomever) can easily turn. I think this essay gets at a lot of these ideas very well:
"We need to do a better job of framing things like "if you switch to a worse phone plan and save $10 per month to invest, you will probably have something around $30,000 in 30 years while only investing $3,600."."
Prove that is possible. Find an investment that will do that.
Those were back of the napkin numbers. The S&P 500 has an average annual return around 10%. With a monthly investment of $10, it would take just over 32 years to get to $30,000. So I might have been a little too generous but the numbers are still realistic and the specific numbers were not really the point of the comment anyway.
The numbers were very much a part of the comment, and thus it is quite valid to guarantee you're still operating in reality when you make claims like that. Your 32 years to get $30,000 makes a lot of assumptions. One, that in 32 years $30k is going to be a significant amount of money, still. Second, that the person investing does not have an event in their life that would drain away any investments that they have, like an illness.
This is one of the subjects I wish developers (of all persuasions) would consistently put pressure on local representatives; don't let these sales to voting companies just happen without pushback.
We can't expect representatives or legislatures to be technically adept at all things (or anything for that matter). The fact that this has all gone down over the last couple of years without much of a fuss from our industry is shameful. We get riled up over corporate battles, which tech stack is the best, but when it comes to protecting the people's sovereignty and everyone's rights, the silence from our industry as a whole, across all strata, is deafening. We should be angry. We should be loud. It should be a subject that comes up at least once a month at meet ups and happy hours. But like the rest of the populace, we've been silent. A good portion of us (developers) have been just as ignorant about acquisitions and policies surrounding voting machines as the general populace.
If there is one thing that you should write or call your representatives about (local, state, and federal), just by virtue of your profession and interests, it needs to be about e-voting. All developers have what I believe is an ethical duty to our country to be educated about this subject and to make sure we're disseminating accurate and helpful information to our representatives, our friends, our neighbors, and our families.
Here's some helpful links to get you started if you've never broached this subject, need a refresher, or just want to see how you can help out:
I firmly believe that we should stick with pen and paper. However, I think that battle is already lost. We need to secure what governments/people want to use and we need to do our part to make sure our representatives/voting boards are making informed choices about which systems they'll be deploying in the field.
Educate yourself and contact your representatives. Do your part for our democracy.
I think a lot of people who actively moderate truly public forums/media channels understand this. Not doing anything is the worst thing you can do. At this point in my online life, claiming that "if you ignore them they'll go away" paints you as a co-conspirator/pseudo-supporter or just foolishly naive in my mind.
>there has always been a myth about the time and place where things were more innocent, when trolling was all in good fun.
And it IS a myth. It's a do nothing attitude and it's easy to take when it doesn't affect you personally. Summed up perfectly by the very next statement in the article:
>But what everyone really remembers about these proverbial times isn’t their purity. It’s how they didn’t see the big deal back then. They remember how they felt a sense of permission, a belief that it was all okay. But that was only true for those who were like them, who thought exactly like they did.
It was refreshing to see this view point espoused on a rather large technology site.
People who weren't online in an earlier time should probably refrain from making statements about how it was different, just as people who weren't actually at a company, in a battle, etc. should refrain from making statements about how it was for the participants. It just makes them look ignorant and quick to judgment. From my own experience, trolling back in the Usenet was generally less serious back then. There was more of a tacit understanding that you were there voluntarily, that you could leave or even come back under another name. Trolling was usually transient, didn't spill over into people's real lives, and only worked because somebody chose to be invested in the subject matter. That doesn't make any of it OK, but it was different.
As for the point about feeding or not feeding trolls, I think another commenter already made the important point that it's different for users vs. administrators. Users should ignore trolls, for all the reasons historically given. It does work. I've seen it hundreds of times, even when I was a moderator on a millions-of-posts political site. On the other hand, administrators need to take a more active approach. Back on Usenet, or even to a large extent on early web forums, there were no administrators. The approach for users was the only approach. Nowadays, when trolling has much more serious affects on people's lives and it's harder to get away, a more active approach is called for. The OP's basic thesis is right, if you make the distinction between what users should do vs. what administrators should do, but some of their and your facile generalizations about the past are still rather amusing.
P.S. It should also be noted that there are legal issues affecting whether a site owner should be involved in moderating content, and those legal reasons change all the time, but that's a whole separate thread.
> Are you saying I was not around during the time periods discussed?
I wouldn't presume. Such assumptions are the OP's game, not mine.
> most of it is just vague dismissals
That's simply untrue. I was quite specific about how trolling was different, about the distinction between what users should do vs. what administrators, and why they should be different. Far more specific than you have been. Apparently an imagined slight in one or two sentences prevented you from reading the rest before you replied, but that's not the same as it not being there.
> People who weren't online in an earlier time should probably refrain from making statements about how it was different
> But some of their and your facile generalizations about the past are still rather amusing.
Would you care to contextualize these statements in a manner that upon first, second, or third reading doesn't qualify as assumptions and/or general grand standing?
I concur. The author of the piece was there, which passes notacoward's (IMO too-)strict requirement that those who were not there should not talk about it.
I also think the author's description of '"gatekeeper" behavior' is a good description of this view point.
Going back to notacoward's comments, starting with "trolling back in the Usenet was generally less serious back then".
1993 is when one of my students tried to email me a death threat anonymously. Yes, I know email isn't Usenet. I bring it up because one of the negatives of looking through one's personal experience is that past often looks rosier than it was. So much of it is new, and you don't know what's happening with others.
I think the author already addressed notacoward's comment with:
> But what everyone really remembers about these proverbial times isn’t their purity. It’s how they didn’t see the big deal back then. They remember how they felt a sense of permission, a belief that it was all okay. But that was only true for those who were like them, who thought exactly like they did. All the while, someone else was getting stepped on and bullied while others laughed. The story of the internet has always been the same story: disaffected young men thinking their boorish and cruel behavior was justified or permissible.
I think the author also addressed notacoward's comment "you could leave or even come back under another name" by quoting Quinn: “The internet was my home, and treating it like a magical alternate dimension where nothing of consequence happens was insulting. Telling a victim of a mob calling for their head online to not go online anymore is like telling someone who has a hate group camped in their yard to just not go outside.”
Notacoward also proposes "administrators need to take a more active approach". This is also what the author proposes, saying:
> “Don’t feed the trolls” also ignores an obvious method for addressing online abuse: skilled moderation and the willingness to kick people off platforms for violating rules about abuse. At one website I used to write for, everyone constantly remarked that we had the most amazing, thoughtful commenters. How did we achieve this? Easy: a one-strike policy.
Notacoward wrote "but some of their and your facile generalizations about the past are still rather amusing."
Would you care to point out some of those facile generalizations about the past? I started on BITNET with Listserv back in 1989, so I am also a member of the old-fogey/pre-Eternal September club. I didn't see anything which came close to an amusing generalization.
And yes, I remember the trolls calling for "free speech" even back then, as cover to permit continued abusive behavior.
> one of the negatives of looking through one's personal experience
So your anecdote trumps mine? Sorry, but no. Sounds like you had a worse-than-normal experience. That's bad, but it doesn't change the fact that the environment at the time didn't lend itself to serious trolling. There was less persistence or verification of identity, for example. Finding out who "Alba Troll" on M-Net was, or "Burrito" on LambdaMOO, would have been non-trivial, and so would finding an address for that person (me BTW). Now just about anyone can find my real name on Facebook, and map that real name to a real address, in seconds. That's a huge difference. What's funny is that we're having this discussion on HN, under pseudonyms, which makes it much more like the old 'net than a lot of other places. And not surprisingly, the rampant trolling here has a different flavor than the trolling elsewhere.
How well did you understand what was happening with other people back then? My anecdote was meant to show that perhaps your knowledge wasn't as broad as you might have thought.
I'll quote from the 1993 paper "Gender Swapping on the Internet", at http://public.callutheran.edu/~chenxi/Phil350_132.pdf to give an idea of how even back then women might feel like they needed to hide their gender in order to prevent unwanted attention from anonymous people:
> "Back when I had time for MUD, I, too, played female characters. I found it extraordinarily interesting. It gave me a slightly more concrete understanding of why some women say, "Men suck." It was both amusing and disturbing."
> Female characters are often besieged with attention. By typing using the who command, it is possible to get a list of all characters logged on. The page command allows one to talk to people not in the same room. Many male players will get a list of all present, and then page characters with female names. Unwanted attention and sexual advances create an uncomfortable atmosphere for women in MUDs, just as they do in
real life.
> ... Male characters often expect sexual favors in return for technical assistance. A male character once requested a kiss from me after answering a question. A gift always incurs an obligation. Offering technical help, like picking up the check at dinner, can be used to try to purchase rather than win a woman's favor. While this can be subtle and sometimes overlooked in real life, in MUDs it is blatant, directly experienced by most, and openly discussed in public forums such as this USENET discussion.
No, these are not examples of trolling per se, nor is it meant to trump your statement. It is meant to re-enforce my question "How well did you understand what was happening with other people back then?"
"which makes it much more like the old 'net than a lot of other places"
Umm, HN has a strong moderator presence here, like https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang . That's rather different than "the old 'net", yes? (To be certain, there were moderated BBses and MUDs even back then too. But that's not what you were talking about.)
> I'll quote from the 1993 paper "Gender Swapping on the Internet"
...for which I was interviewed and quoted BTW. I was present for many of the other events Bruckman has written about, and was a principal target/victim/whatever in one. Ditto for Turkle.
> "How well did you understand what was happening with other people back then?"
Now that we have established our bona fides, let's get back to kadenshep's comment. You originally wrote:
> People who weren't online in an earlier time should probably refrain from making statements about how it was different, just as people who weren't actually at a company, in a battle, etc. should refrain from making statements about how it was for the participants.
To whom was your comment directed? To the author of the article? But the author clearly states "I was there in 1993, too, equal parts young, naïve, and shy, but so damn excited about the idea of suddenly communicating with people around the world."
The author also brings up the concept of 'gatekeeper behavior', saying:
> ... his esteem rests on the fact that he knows certain things that others do not. Like all gatekeeper behavior, it was ostensibly a check on the credibility of the target. Also like all gatekeeper behavior, it wasn’t really about whether or not someone passes the test, but rather the gatekeeper feeling like they can control what is true and not true about the subject. Alas for him, I was there in 1993, too, equal parts young, naïve, and shy, but so damn excited about the idea of suddenly communicating with people around the world.
I read kadenshep's comment "I think your view point is directly addressed in the article." in that context. That is, it's easy to interpret what you wrote as gatekeeper behavior.
This of course can also be poisoning-the-well sort of argument, as it is hard to address by simply saying "From my own experience". Which is all that you did.
You still have not pointed out some of those facile generalizations about the past that kadenshep made.
Ordinary users and commenters should ignore trolls, but administrators and moderators should not. They should use every underhand trick in the book, just as trolls do.
Users only add fuel to the fire. Administrators can extinguish it.
I'm not sure how to interpret "ordinary users". I read several blogs with an actively enforced moderation system. However, they are still personal blogs, with a single moderator who can kick people off, and the moderator can't be there all the time.
What I've seen is that there are long-time commenters who will reply to the abusive behavior of trolls, not taking the bait but calling out the abusive behavior for what it is.
They cannot moderate, but as long-time users they are also not "ordinary." In the cases I'm thinking of, their responses don't seem to add fuel to the fire.
> I feed trolls. Not always, not every troll, but when I feel like it—when I think it will make me feel better—I talk back. I talk back because the expectation is that when you tell a woman to shut up, she should shut up. I reject that. I talk back because it's fun, sometimes, to rip an abusive dummy to shreds with my friends. I talk back because my mental health is my priority—not some troll's personal satisfaction. I talk back because it emboldens other women to talk back online and in real life, and I talk back because women have told me that my responses give them a script for dealing with monsters in their own lives. And, most importantly, I talk back because internet trolls are not, in fact, monsters. They are human beings—and I don't believe that their attempts to dehumanize me can be counteracted by dehumanizing them. The only thing that fights dehumanization is increased humanization—of me, of them, of marginalized groups in general, of the internet as a whole.
What's your definition of properly designed projects?