Pretty exiting times in aerospace these days. Seeing spacex doing awesome innovation with starship and boom making good progress bringing back supersonic air travel
Until the FAA oversight and permitting regs are updated, it's far too cost and time prohibitive to bring anything (aside from avionics) truly innovative to the GA market.
For a vivid example, look at the multi-year certification torture that even a minor new engine design (DeltaHawk https://www.deltahawk.com/ ) must endure, or hell, the comical marathon of low-lead avgas adoption, or even a basic 12V https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22K-XdV7e-0 lithium battery.
GA is a hell of a fun hobby, but not a market conducive to venture capital timelines or returns.
> Until the FAA oversight and permitting regs are updated, it's far too cost and time prohibitive to bring anything (aside from avionics) truly innovative to the GA market.
Unless you take a look at why those regulations came into place - literally tens of thousands of people dying in fiery crashes. Aviation safety is an incredibly complex topic, and even with the strict regulatory regimes of today, companies like Boeing manage to skirt the rules and proudly sell planes that crash themselves, or fall apart in mid air.
Lowering regulatory boundaries in aviation will certainly result in more death.
I'm not saying the regulatory environment is wrong. I'm saying the market it creates (aside from avionics) is not a good fit for innovation stemming from venture capital due to venture capital's expected return magnitudes and timelines.
I cited three technologies (ICE engine redesign, low-lead gasoline, and lithium batteries) where those timelines for market adoption (outside of GA) were orders of magnitude (decades) shorter.
My comments were solely targeted at GA. Commercial aviation is an entirely different ball game.
I know that we like to circle jerk about "written in blood" around here but your take is asinine.
We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry,
Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry.
Furthermore, the whole Boeing fiasco is a great illustration of how futile the approach that you people peddle is. Boeing and their army of lawyers and carousel of lobbyists get to skirt or play right up to the letter of the the regulation while the little guy has to bend over and take it full force. So what even is the point of having the same set of rules if the big guys are the ones subject to less rules in practice?
I'm not saying repeal it all or exempt GA but the current approach is clearly the worst of both worlds and ought to be changed.
> I know that we like to circle jerk about "written in blood" around here but your take is asinine.
Aviation regulations are indeed written in blood. I can recommend https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ if you're into reading, or https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot if you're into watching for some education of how bad things used to be. Airplane crashes were an almost weekly occurrence, sometimes barely making it into national news. Enormous advances have happened in technology, redundancy, training, maintenance to make aviation absurdly safe. In the US, you have a higher chance of injury/death while driving to the airport than flying (if anything that's an indictment on American roads, terrible cars and bad drivers, but that's a whole other topic).
> We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry,
> Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry.
If you think GA is under the same regulatory regime as civilian airliners, you're misinformed. It's drastically easier, with much less redundancy or safety requirements. None of the current GA planes would be accepted in commercial airline service for a variety of reasons. For a quick example, TCAS (a system that will warn you if you're going to crash into another plane) isn't mandatory for planes with less than 30 seats or with takeoff weight less than 33,000lbs.
And as for why there are still regulations for GA, it's quite easy - those planes fly in the same airspace, and them falling down on population centres or crashing into other planes can kill people just as much as a civilian airliner. You really really have to try to kill someone if your Zodiac fails.
> Furthermore, the whole Boeing fiasco is a great illustration of how futile the approach that you people peddle is. Boeing and their army of lawyers and carousel of lobbyists get to skirt or play right up to the letter of the the regulation while the little guy has to bend over and take it full force. So what even is the point of having the same set of rules if the big guys are the ones subject to less rules in practice?
Boeing aren't subjected to less rules. They're lucky to be in a country that doesn't care that much for rules because they're the national champion and must be protected. But the rules still are being enforced for them - they're at a very low production cap because they shat the bed so badly so many times.
There's a company called Airhart that's trying to bring Fly-By-Wire to GA. But (at least in the US) I think innovation would be better focused on regulations - looking at you aeromedical specifically.
For what it’s worth, control chart sensitivity rules are selected based on economic considerations. So the decision to use five points is influenced by both statics and how affordable it is to investigate why the control chart alerted. Sensitivity rules can be adjusted, applied, or ignored based on the specific situation and the analysts tolerance for false positives/negatives.
A single data point doesn't establish any direction or trend at all.
With two data points you can establish a trend and make a prediction about the next data point. However, any two data points form a line, so any two results can be used to make a trend, however wrong it may be.
Only when more points are used can you confirm the trend and reduce the probability of being (un)lucky.
If the worry is about the manufacturer rather than the design, then we have more than two data points. The Soyuz-2 launch vehicle, which is replacing Soyuz-FG, has about a 10% failure rate (including an ISS resupply mission in 2015). This was as far as I know the second-to-last -FG flight planned, as manufacturing has been discontinued and the -2 is the main production line now.
This reminds me of the fact that if you give most people the output of a true random number generator, they'll think it's rigged because there appears to be more clustering than is intuitive.
I recommend making a playlist and making a self-blind study which feels more random: your native music player shuffling it or a true random shuffling of the list.
That's because most people don't really want a "random" playlist. They want a random shuffle: A set of songs played in random order with no repeats until all have been played. That's not the same as making independent random picks from a list, but that's what most people want when they "randomize" their playlist.
I was more thinking about taking a list and shuffling it instead of picking songs at random.
In both cases, people complain because, for example, the same artist might be picked twice in a row. Most shuffle functions aren't random but try to make distance between similar songs.
"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's not. I think it's very reasonable to want alternatives in any case.
Russia at this point is largely deindustrialized and rapidly losing its tech know-how. The recent string of failures in space programme is only one (but certainly high profile) manifestation of it.
Even with three failures I would not consider it a trend unless they are related in nature. For the current trend of "basically no failures" to go to "some failures" you'd need a couple dozen failures at minimum.
I don't think that's particularly much news. I would expect any space agency to ground every single part of a rocket until they are 100% ruled out as source of a failure.
That Soyuz rockets have been grounded pending investigation is also a fact, and a natural course of action for any responsible space agency. Other rockets have also been grounded after accidents. The implications for the ISS crew if future Soyuz flights do not resume on schedule are a question that many are asking, so it's hardly unusual to address it.
Given that everyone knew the astronauts were safe and nobody died, the idea that people shouldn't discuss the causes and consequences of an incident when it's still fresh in people's minds makes even less sense than usual.
The article went up in less than an hour after the accident. At that time it was only known that the crew landed and not much else. They updated the story later on with details on the crew condition, but the title you see is the original one.
The article was published 1 hour 46 minutes after the failed launch, not "less than an hour", and as reported the crew's survival was confirmed 20 minutes after the incident:
> After about 20 minutes of uncertainty, Russian officials confirmed the crew were OK, and had landed about 20km east of Dzhezkazgan, a city in central Kazakhstan. As rescue crews arrived, Hague and Ovchinin were reported in "good condition" and found out of the capsule.
The launch took place at 8:40 UTC. The article's timestamp indicates it was published at 10:26 UTC (3:26 AM PDT). That lines up with the cached copy above from 10:45 UTC, and a snapshot of Ars Technica's homepage at 10:05 UTC in which the Soyuz story had not yet appeared (with the next snapshot at 11:02 UTC showing the article, as expected): https://web.archive.org/web/20181011100529/https://arstechni...
The fact that the headline says the crew made an "emergency landing" and not a "crash" should have been a tip-off.
Off topic, but I found those photos to be very nice. Is it just an app and an iPhone? I would love to be able to take photos like those. Are there any blogs or anything which have guides on this sort of photography?
Author here. Thank you! The iPhone 5s is quite superior when it comes to photography and the rest of it I do through VSCO CAM ( http://vsco.co/vscocam ).
According to the author, they were taken using an iphone 5s and edited with vsco. It's a great app that gives this analog feel. You can check their site: http://vsco.co/vscocam.
From the manly beach and the airbus shot, it could be an iphone or similar, yes. The low light and mixed exposure shots give it away. I agree though, it looks lovely, especially the night market and the London shot - very nice light.
How to take photos like this? Well, I'm no expert, but I would say the key to all good photography is framing, lighting, and throwing away 99.9% of the hundreds of photos you take.
Beautiful work! I love the colour and contrast. The London, Phuket (both) and Byron shots are just great. Oh and I liked the article too, except I'd replace samsonite with rimowa :)
Am I alone in finding the graph scary? This rate of change in temperature is probably not something that would be easy to slow down, yet it feels like not many people care about this.
"The frame contains". Meaning that every dead and then-living human was within the camera's view frustum, except for the three in the spacecraft. Not considering whether they're in the nighttime part of the planet or on the far side away from the camera; just that they're somewhere within the field of view.
Presumably many photos of the Earth from spacecraft have achieved the first part of that criterion, as Cassini's will. But the set of photos of most of the human race minus a few is much smaller: limited to the moon missions, because the shuttle and space station orbit too low to fit the entire Earth in one camera frame.
The photograph captured the light from the planet where everyone who has ever lived has spent their entire life, except for a small number of astronauts. More accurate, but less spiritual/sentimental sounding.
I had a front page item about a year ago. The article ended up getting like 300 points so it was on the front page for around 12 hours. All the content was served by nginx on a micro EC2 instance, nothing was even put on a CDN. But still, it worked flawlessly.
I kind of did something vaguely similar, except less cool. I wanted to learn a little python except there was problems with getting internet access at my house. I was only without internet for like 3 weeks but that didn't cause too many problems with learning (and could always go to a friends house if I really needed internet). The best thing that helped me when learning was the python docs.
I highly suggest downloading documentation. Just going through little sections of the documentation was a great way to learn. Not having internet was also sometimes a good thing as there was very little distraction.
Hey, OP here. I realize now that it was a mistake to come off like that but there were a few reasons on why I did:
- I just felt like a piece of shit when I wrote it because I have no connections and have had a very hard time trying to get a normal job. I also had no confidence that any of this would work out so that did not help my ego when writing.
- When I submitted this to HN, it was fairly late and I went to sleep about half and hour later so basically I slept through the entire discussion going on here and it would have been a bit late to change anything after I woke up.
- There was a comment or two saying that maybe I should change the post of labs.im (before I went to sleep) but I did not know what I could write. I didn't just want to write something like "im smart and can do this well" because anyone could say that and I particularly dislike talking about myself like that.
Also, to anyone that has emailed me, I have not replied to any emails yet but I am starting now. And sorry for the late reply.
I can relate to not wanting to say you're smart and can't do something well. I was/am sometimes the same way. For me it was imposter syndrome plus the idea that since everyone says it how would anyone ever believe such trite, cliche pitches. Well, I've learned from experience that there's a reason so many people market themselves in such similar ways. It works. It's still unbelievable to me but it works. Plus, if it ends up being true it makes your life much easier and things just flow.
You are smart and talented though. So just say so, feel cheesy about it, and profit.
This is the first time I have ever heard the term "imposter syndrome" and I realized that is exactly what I have. Thanks for introducing me to the concept.
Along with 750 instance hours of Windows Server 2008 R2 per month, the Free Usage Tier also provides another 750 instance hours to run Linux (also on a t1.micro)
Does that mean you can run two t1.micro servers concurrently?
Can someone innovate general aviation
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