Advertising and selling a feature that you don't have sure seems like fraud to me.
If it's "the feature is nearly ready but just needs some polish" there's an argument to be made that maybe you were just being a bit too hopeful. But "years and lots of fundamental research away, and we're not even sure what sensor systems were going to rely on", that's just fraud. You're looking for early stage investors, not customer preorders, at that point.
Nah. There are various people who call for policies like this, but then most reasonable instance admins ignore them, and the fediverse continues to operate.
The same thing has happened in the free software movement in general; some folks have called for copyleft-only, and the rest of the world has largely ignored them and is fine with shipping BSD licensed software along with GPL licensed software.
There were $13 billion in loans, and private investments from other folks like Larry Ellison and Suadi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal as well as some private equity firms.
So yes, there are shareholders, and there are creditors, it's just that in the private equity world, "caveat emptor" applies, they are expected to be sophisticated and wealthy enough to not need the protections given to investors in publicly traded companies.
We basically built towards a local maximum of what's physically possible for fossil-fuel powered sub-sonic aircraft; we also pushed into super-sonic, but the efficiency and noise pretty much preclude that for all but military and niche commercial operations.
However, there have been huge improvements in other areas, like efficiency and safety. Take a look at this fatal accident charts, and remember that aviation usage has been growing in the meantime, so rates per passenger and per passenger mile have been improving even more than this shows.
> remember that aviation usage has been growing in the meantime, so rates per passenger and per passenger mile have been improving even more than this shows
Yep, thanks! Was looking for a chart like that but didn't find one on a quick search.
And yeah, that's a huge improvement in safety. So while the general shape of airplanes, and range and speed might seem similar, the airplanes themselves and the whole ecosystem around them (pilots, maintenance, airline and airport ops, air traffic control, and so on) are far safer.
I don't think "promoted" is the right way to look at it. That kind of implies some kind of paid marketing campaign, while as far as I can tell, the interest in Rust tends to be organic.
The thing is, Rust is a bit more novel and interesting than JavaScript or Python. They are both over 25 years old, well established, just about everyone has used or interacted with them. They come from somewhat similar language backgrounds, of dynamically typed garbage collected languages that try to be approachable, with optional static typing these days. Rust is much newer, only being publicly announced a bit over 10 years ago, and stable for seven years, and it offers some unique features that very few other languages outside of academia or very niche fields offer, while also being intended to actually be used as a production language, not just an academic curiosity.
This novelty and distinction makes Rust an interesting topic of discussion; not just for folks promoting it, but also skeptics of the approaches it takes. And Hacker News being a discussion site, it's not terribly surprising that a language that is novel, and polarizing, is discussed more often than ones that are pretty much ubiquitous at this point. That doesn't mean it's used more by HN users, but it certainly is discussed more, because it's more interesting to discuss.
It's funny how the meta-game works here. Fleecing the casuals is, of course, the way the pros make money; so it's basically the point of the game. But I can see how fleecing the casuals slowly is probably a better long-term strategy, that will ultimately extract more money from them, than doing it quickly, draining their bankroll, which may stop them from playing or get them to play less consistently.
> But I can see how fleecing the casuals slowly is probably a better long-term strategy, that will ultimately extract more money from them, than doing it quickly, draining their bankroll, which may stop them from playing or get them to play less consistently.
This is exactly correct.
This is why it’s difficult to build and sustain a plo8/nlo8 ecology online or live. The good players just clean out the casuals so quickly and relatively risk free via freerolling. It largely only exists in a sustainable way in mixed rotations.
I was an online plo8 player who had to switch to plo to increase my game selection. It got to a point that I knew all of the other players at the table, and they were not giving up much in terms of ev (although most of them had exploitable gaps in their games).
What's a good resource for learning GTO play? I used to be a decent small to medium stakes player, studied a few 2+2 books, that kind of thing, but haven't played much in the past decade or so. Don't have any plans to get back into it seriously, but wouldn't mind getting to the point where I could sit down at a random NL100 or 200 B&M table and have an at least even expectation.
Let me start off by saying that GTO is not the panacea some folks want it to be. It helps find some new lines for sure, it is really good at short stack problems, it helps a lot with starting hand ranges, and it is quite good for hu play.
All that said, most gto output assumes that your opponent is also playing gto. This is usually not the case, especially live. You can node lock in solvers to address this, but that’s a bit of a dark art since you have to assign unknown ranges to villain’s range — it’s just your best guess.
All that said, gto is a great mental exercise, and it has definitely improved my game.
> What's a good resource for learning GTO play?
Play optimal poker 1 and 2 by brokos. Good intro.
Modern poker theory by Acevedo for a little more advanced stuff.
Jonathon little has YT vids with some gto breakdown for hand analysis. He’s not a gto specialist, but he has one or more on his staff (iirc, Acevedo is/was one). His videos are on the simple side and are largely aimed at 1/3 and 2/5 live players, but it’s a soft intro.
Mariano poker on YT has improved a ton over the past few years. He seems to be relatively balanced while still exploiting when possible. His early vids show how to play (and not play) at lower stakes and win, at least in California games.
If you can see any stream with Garrett Adelstein, I would watch it. Mostly hustler live and live at the bike. He plays deep stack, and is a poker god among mere mortals.
> wouldn't mind getting to the point where I could sit down at a random NL100 or 200 B&M table and have an at least even expectation
If you were a winning online player before, you are currently +ev at 1/2 or 1/3 live tables.
The play is atrocious.
I will add that exploitative play is ideal at these stakes, and most gto is largely wasted.
It won’t be until some B&M 5/10 games and many 10/25 games and higher (usually with many pros) that you will see balanced play, although there is no small amount of exploitative play when whales are in the game.
The gauges on that particular one have been removed; on others, they may have been replaced, or the radioactive paint stripped off, or the dose deemed low enough to not be worth worrying about.
eVTOL have to be designed to the same safety standards as other aircraft; and in fact, they will be held to slightly higher design safety standards due to their novelty, required to meet safety standards that otherwise only apply to larger transport category aircraft.
You are right, eVTOL cannot autorotate, but electric motors can be far more reliable than internal combustion engines, with many fewer failure modes. Additionally, they are much lighter, and so you can have much greater redundancy. There is considerable redundancy in the lift motors on these aircraft, so one or in many cases more than one lift motor can fail while still providing safe and controllable flight. The exact level of redundancy needed is verified via probabilistic risk analysis, considering failure probabilities of different components, and as mentioned the target failure rate will be lower for these than for equivalent sized conventional aircraft due to their novelty.
While there's still a lot of design and development work to do, I'd be very surprised if these didn't end up much more reliable and less prone to failure than helicopters and single engine airplanes.
Note: I work for one of these startups, so I may be a bit biased, but I also have insight into the design process and safety and redundancy of systems are absolutely a top concern.
Oh, I should also say, for a helicopter autorotation is only particularly helpful if you have enough forward airspeed or height to initiate it. Helicopters come with an HV diagram indicating safe flight envelope, such that autoration could be initiated in case of an engine failure, or you are low enough for a crash to be survivable if you do not have enough height or airspeed for autoration.
In an eVTOL, if you have enough height or velocity, you should be able to glide on the wing. So you'll be wanting to keep yourself in the appropriate region of the HV curve, and your emergency engine out procedure will be much more like a conventional fixed wing aircraft, rather than a helicopter.
We shall see… I can make a strong counter argument for your first paragraph.
The EVTOL community has long lobbied for, and for some time, has gotten away with a whole new set of performance based standards not previously used to certify other aircraft of similar size and weight. This was, of course, until several weeks ago when the FAA made the abrupt rule change going from Part 23 to 21.17b for these vehicles. Much has been said about this in the industry, but I understand that questioning the performance based standards is at the core. We’ll see where the dust lands, but it’s clear that some in the EVTOL community are not interested in applying airliner safety standards to these vehicles.
Questions: is your firm following ARP 4754A and 4761 to the letter? What systems are being mandated to DAL A (requiring a 10 to the minus 9 failure rate?) Are these the usual components found in other jets, or new components that typically haven’t required the same level of safety criticality?
These are a whole new type of aircraft—there are so many unknowns that it’s impossible to compare safety standards to other aircraft, even if the intent is to meet something like Part 25.1309. Case in point: power distribution systems in airliners are rarely DAL A, but I’d recon they’re pretty damn safety critical in an EVTOL. No power distribution = no spinning propellers = no thrust, and all on a “powered lift vehicle…” cue the classic line about the V22, “a plane that can’t glide AND a heli that can’t autorotate—all in one!”
You're right, some other entrants in the eVTOL community seem to have strategies that rely on some kind of regulatory magic. The company I'm working for, Beta, is taking a very different strategic approach, with much less reliance on "then some regulatory magic happens;" we are focusing on cargo first, and a passenger variant later. We are not particularly concerned with the change to 21.17b, we're willing to work with the FAA on that rather than fighting it. And because our initial target is cargo, such as transporting organs between hospitals with existing helipad infrastructure or cargo from airport to distribution center, there are a lot fewer regulatory hurdles about where we operate than the air taxi market.
We are following ARP4754A and 4761, yes. We are still in the process of doing our safety assessments at the aircraft and systems levels and finalizing our type certified design, so I can't say which systems are going to be required to be DAL-A, but I expect that the pilot inputs, flight controller, battery systems, high voltage distribution system, low voltage distribution system, lift motors, and control surface servos will be designed to that level. Our strategy is to build ourselves the critical components for an electric aircraft, so we are doing the battery, high voltage distribution, and electric motors, while we are buying the other components (pilot inputs, flight control computer, control surface servos, primary flight displays, etc) from existing suppliers who already have experience in this space.
In the meantime, we are also learning a lot from flight test of our experimental proof-of-concept airframes, which we can feed into this process. We've already built one experimental eVTOL under a previous design, and then two proof of concept airframes with a design much closer to the type certified design that we're now working on; so while we go through the process of breaking down the requirements per 4754A and doing safety assessments per 4761 and working on our final type certified design, we're also learning a lot about operational concerns and refining our design on our experimental proof of concept airframes.
As for the V22 line, well, our aircraft can't autorotate, but it's not bad as a glider. That was a primary design criterion; it should mostly be a glider that happens to have electric power. We recently did a cross-country trip halfway across the country on our PoC aircraft in CTOL configuration (https://evtol.news/news/beta-alia-250-prototype-flies-cross-...), with a number of stops on the way, of course, our range is limited by physics, and the majority of that trip was done such that there was an airport within the glide cone of our aircraft; we did allow for a few legs in which that wasn't always the case, and we would need to ditch in the event of power failure, but for most of the trip there was an airport within our glide cone if we had a power off event.
We are focusing on a slightly different market than the other entrants; we're focusing initially on cargo rather than passenger transit. One initial customer is United Therapeutics, for transporting organ transplants and artificial organs to hospitals. Another is UPS, for getting air freight from airports to distribution centers; cutting out the truck trip can save a ton of time there. We are also making a passenger variant, but since the regulatory and NIMBY concerns for the passenger air taxi market present a lot of risk, we're not betting solely on that market like a lot of the other companies are.
This helps with a lot of the concerns raised in this thread. In fact, another one that I'm not sure has been brought up is vertiport design and siting concerns; right now standards on vertiports are still a work in progress, and there are questions about whether it will be feasible to get them installed, because even with vertical takeoff and landing you generally need to keep approach angles of about 15° clear, which means once a vertiport is installed you need to limit the heights of any surrounding buildings to keep the approach clear.
To address a few of your other concerns: we're located in northern Vermont, we know cold weather. Actually, for our use case hot weather tends to be more of a concern; batteries and motors heat up when used, especially in the very high power vertical lift phase, so our limitations there tend to be thermal and cold air provides better cooling.
Our charging stations also include air for cooling and warming the batteries; so you should be able to avoid the issues with batteries being cold on startup with our air system.
All aircraft have limitations on weather that they can be flown in; crosswind limits for takeoff and landing, etc. As very lightweight aircraft, with high lift/drag, these will be somewhat lower than the limits for your big jumbo jets, but will be high enough to be useful in a lot of weather. All aircraft have requirements for design and testing for HIRF (high intensity radiated field/lightning), so these will all be certified to the same standard there. Aircraft can optionally be certified for flight into known icing conditions (FIKI); I believe our plan is to have the capability, but as an optional add on, as it requires a number of heating elements which add weight and complexity. But overall, the weather concerns shouldn't be too much different than for other small aircraft.
As far as safety goes, that's obviously a concern in any aircraft. One advantage of electric aircraft is that electric propulsion systems are far mechanically simpler, with far fewer moving and wearing parts. The only real wear item of concern are the main bearings on the motors, and the landing gear. So maintenance intervals can be much longer than with ICE aircraft, and I expect reliability to be considerably higher. Additionally, electric motors can be much smaller and lighter, and thus can be made redundant. Each propeller on our aircraft will be driven by multiple independent motors (probably can't say the exact configuration at the moment), so that motor failures can be tolerated without catastrophic consequences.
Most aircraft have a “maximum demonstrated crosswind capability” which is a required test flight item but is not a limitation. It has to be demonstrated during flight testing to a figure of not less than 20% of Vso, but once that’s hit, they don’t have to find a greater crosswind to determine an actual limit.
You're right. The maximum demonstrated crosswind velocity isn't a limit, but more of a guideline, based on what was tested for.
However, many aircraft do that testing to a higher level than is required. For instance, for a Cessna 172, 20% of Vso would be 8.2 knots, but it has a maximum demonstrated crosswind velocity of 15 knots.
Anyhow, all I'm saying is that at least for our aircraft, it looks likely that the maximum demonstrated crosswind velocity will be on the low side; at least the mandated limit based on Vso, possibly a few knots higher, but like most small aircraft, much much lower than what you have for big jets.
Pilots will care more about the aircraft’s capabilities than the demonstrated crosswind limits. My A36 was demonstrated to only 15knots IIRC, but easily handles a 25 knot direct crosswind. Whether Beech test flew it to 11, 15, or 20 knots I wouldn’t care the least bit about.
(In VTOL mode, could you wheel the aircraft into the prevailing wind for takeoff and/or land it pointed into the wind to reduce crosswind effects? [I’m a fixed wing guy with I think only 0.7 dual received in a helo.])
Yes, in VTOL mode you are generally going to want to land into the wind or wheel the aircraft into the wind for takeoff. I think that would probably be possible.
But we are also concerned with CTOL performance; in order to add more flexibility, CTOL performance is something that we are focusing on heavily, as if a runway is available you can do a takeoff and/or landing with lower energy use and thus get more range, so we're designing to be able to takoff and land either CTOL or VTOL. For example, one of our use cases is cargo, such as UPS getting packages from an airplane at the airport, to its distribution center. At an airport, you have a runway available for takeoff, so you might do a CTOL takeoff, and then a VTOL landing at the distribution center, and vice versa for the return trip.
And what I'm saying is that our aircraft, at least, won't have crosswind capabilities that are terribly high when doing CTOL takeoff and landing. It's pretty light and floaty and has a strong weathervaning tendency, and control surface sizes are kept limited in order to save weight and drag. It will be able to handle the minimum and maybe a bit more, but I wouldn't expect it to do well significantly above what the demonstrated crosswind velocity is. Ours is designed more as a glider that happens to have electric propulsion and lift capabilities, rather than a conventional powered aircraft, in order to be able to eke more range out of our batteries and provide a greater safety margin in the event of loss of propulsion power, but there are some tradeoffs to that design.
Also, I should say that I'm a software guy, this is my first aviation related job, and I only have about 2 hours in my logbook for dual received, and our certified design is not finalized and we are still doing some trades on things like control surface sizes, so anything I say here might be wrong now or in the future. But right now, we have a fairly limited crosswind envelope.
That might not be as big of a concern as it first appears. You’re rarely more than 50 miles from an airport with either a crossing runway or a taxiway better aligned to the unusual wind (naturally, airports tend to have a primary runway aligned with the prevailing winds when terrain permits).
In an emergency, landing on an aligned taxiway is probably not materially different in risk profile from a VTOL landing on an uncontrolled ramp or parking lot under those same wind conditions.
Yep, I'm not saying it's a big limitation, given the VTOL capabilities and availability of airports. Just that there will be few windy days in which we might not be able to fly, but that's the case for pretty much all small aircraft.
If it's "the feature is nearly ready but just needs some polish" there's an argument to be made that maybe you were just being a bit too hopeful. But "years and lots of fundamental research away, and we're not even sure what sensor systems were going to rely on", that's just fraud. You're looking for early stage investors, not customer preorders, at that point.