This is the equivalent of Altavista touting how amazing their custom server racks are when Google just starts up on a rack of naked motherboards and eats their lunch and then the world.
Lets at least wait till the capsule comes back safely before touting how much better they are than "DevOps" teams running websites, apparently a comparison that's somehow relevant here to stoke egos.
"With limited funds, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin initially deployed this system of inexpensive, interconnected PCs to process many thousands of search requests per second from Google users. This hardware system reflected the Google search algorithm itself, which is based on tolerating multiple computer failures and optimizing around them. This production server was one of about thirty such racks in the first Google data center. Even though many of the installed PCs never worked and were difficult to repair, these racks provided Google with its first large-scale computing system and allowed the company to grow quickly and at minimal cost."
https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-computer-the-google...
I'd chalk that up to the author of the article writing for a relatively nontechnical audience and asking for quotes at that level.
Everything is bespoke.
You need 10x cost to get every extra '9' in reliability and manned flight needs a lot of nines.
People died on the Apollo missions.
It just costs that much.
Funny though I would assume HN people would respect how hard real-time stuff and 'hardened' stuff is.
That alone is worth my tax dollars.
Basically, yes, radiation does cause bit flips, more often than you might expect (but still a rare event in the grand scheme of things, but enough to matter).
And radiation in space is much “worse” (in quotes because that word is glossing over a huge number of different problems, both just intensity).
starkparker•10h ago
arduanika•37m ago