Another contestant in the competition here. Really great stuff from Casey! I'd strongly recommend all those interested in more updates to join the discord server:
I'm no expert but I don't think there's a shortage of experiments that people want to run on mars and the other solar system bodies, especially with sample return capabilities.
We've been launching things into low earth orbit for ~60 years and orbital launch demand still seems to outnumber supply. If we could get our martian surface payload capacity to even 1% of our LEO payload capacity I'm sure there would be many organizations that would want to send something.
While I don't agree with the anti-mars thesis of the article, I do think the article is hitting on something important: Robotic exploration is underrated.
Curiosity cost something like 2 billion to build and launch, but there's no reason building a car-sized rover has to be that expensive. With economies of scale + better design-for-manufacturing + reusable rockets the total cost would easily drop by several orders of magnitude. Why isn't NASA building factories upon factories that produce robotic probes?
Not surprised. I support egalitarianism as much as the next person, but as YC has grown linearly the number of times I’ve thought “what on earth?” about a YC startup has increased exponentially. The sad reality is that there is a finite number of viable startups in the world.
Totally agree. Like you said the method we converged on is to just redirect DNS requests + 303 users depending on if they’ve gotten through the portal yet. It seems to work fine. What’s most frustrating is that most off-the-shelf FOSS dns programs don’t let you do DNS redirects on a per-mac basis, leading us to in-house a decent amount of DNS code.
On mobile OSes, the captive portal is opened in a sandboxed embedded browser. OS designers want to prevent the captive portal from being used maliciously, so they understandably block off a lot of functionality. Problem is they don’t tell you what features they turn off. I.e As far as I can tell iOS blocks off external links and ajax requests (!)
On iOS you can’t close the captive portal programmatically. The user must submit an html form (or similar) and navigate to a new page. Only then will the OS check /mobile-hotspot-detect and realize that the user is connected to the internet and present the user a button to close the captive portal. This is very clunky and makes it impossible to make a sleek user experience
Android automatically closes the captive portal when it detects a connection. This often confuses the user (why did my page suddenly disappear?) and makes it impossible to make a consistent mobile captive portal experience between iOS and android
Androids kernel seems to have two separate, independent captive portal checks
iOS only checks the content of the connectivity check endpoint, while android also checks for any form of a DNS redirect in its requests
Microsoft checks against two different domains for a captive portal
Many Non-stock android distros check against their own custom (and undocumented) endpoints
There was a dhcp option recently introduced to help clean up this mess. Problem is, nobody supports it. Not even Apple (who seemed to have played a hand in the RFC) supports it
Linux is a lost cause
Figuring this all out took over a month of trial and error. Even then many of my conclusions are probably wrong. None of this is documented or standardized!
There is a dhcp option that can be used as an alternative that was recently (~2yr ago) introduced but it’s not supported by any major OSes except android
I am currently writing captive portal support for a big-name internet provider. This article only scratches the surface of how difficult it all is. Each OS is different, and each is painfully undocumented
“ “The barrier to become a technology producer is falling due to low-code and no-code development tools,” Gartner VP Rajesh Kandaswamy told VentureBeat. When asked what kinds of tech products and services these findings apply to, he said “all of them.””
Companies generally don’t apply for FDA authorization unless they’re confident they’ll pass. From my limited experience in the bio/med industry companies are usually in contact with the FDA and it’s a really bad look if you get a rejection.