Hacker News: 46Bit

New comment by 46Bit in "The Helicopter with Radioactive Blades"

46Bit — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:33:08 +0000

The article is very vague on how the radioactivity allows detection of leaking gas.

The video at the bottom explains from 7:50 in. Gas pressure pressing on a spring holds a radiation shield in place. If the gas leaks the shield moves and the radiation can be detected.

New comment by 46Bit in "Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right"

46Bit — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:31:48 +0000

Life in the moment is a lot easier if you don't second-guess yourself. I think this is why many people (and probably ~all people, if tired) crave simplistic solutions.

I like to make a subagent take the "devil's advocate" take on a subject. It usually does all the arguing for me as to why the main agent has it wrong. Commonly results in better decisions that I'd have made alone.

Asking the agent to interview on why I disagree helps too but is more effort.

New comment by 46Bit in "Exercise can be nearly as effective as therapy for depression"

46Bit — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 21:10:01 +0000

Overeating is often a coping mechanism. It’s really hard to displace unless your life is going fantastic. Even with GLPs.

New comment by 46Bit in "Logging sucks"

46Bit — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:29 +0000

What we're doing at Cloudflare (including some of what the author works on) samples adaptively. Each log batch is bucketed based on a few fields, and in each bucket if there's lots of logs in each bucket we only keep the sqrt or log of the number of input logs. It works really well... but part of why it works well is we always have blistering rates of logs, so can cope with spikes in event rates without the sampling system itself getting overwhelmed.

New comment by 46Bit in "UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme"

46Bit — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:55:04 +0000

It’s worth remembering that the status-quo is itself expensive.

GOV.UK Verify, the example I know best, burned through a lot of money trying to do digital identity without actually doing ID cards.

New comment by 46Bit in "Collaboration sucks"

46Bit — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 21:48:21 +0000

> if they can't explain what they want to do clearly and why, it probably shouldn't be done. Quality goes up by slowing down.

I kind of agree. Without what you describe, teams often get lost. But I’ve also seen that approach keep teams stuck in comfortable local minima. Sometimes you’ve got to take risks.

New comment by 46Bit in "My Failures Onboarding at Splunk"

46Bit — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 16:58:56 +0000

I agree, it's an interesting view. I found it quite positive about the culture in that part of Splunk. The writer parachuted in, threw their weight around, bruised a bunch of people, but lost out to another manager who openly acknowledged the contributions of their people.

New comment by 46Bit in "Reasons veterans are especially hard-hit by federal cuts"

46Bit — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 17:11:10 +0000

> provides the vacuum for better processes to grow back into

Or worse. Or no services at all.

New comment by 46Bit in "Magnetic field sorting of superconducting graphite particles with Tc>400K (2024)"

46Bit — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 18:32:11 +0000

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/1gm4w4i/is_ther...

New comment by 46Bit in "Terence Tao: Trump's Federal Funding Freeze and Mean-Field Game Theory"

46Bit — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 12:24:00 +0000

> I've been wondering for a few decades now if we shouldn't create a rendezvous site outside of all the countries that require a visa to work

There's always Svalbard

New comment by 46Bit in "Das Blinkenlights"

46Bit — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 04:16:23 +0000

The effect is really cool. I like the idea of visualizing data flowing through work systems like this. I think I'll go for 3D-printed or laser-cut panels instead though - would work out cheaper. Thanks :)

New comment by 46Bit in "Studios: Please Don't Spoil the Movie We Are Seated to See"

46Bit — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 19:13:09 +0000

I saw that without any spoilers and it was one of the weirdest movie experiences I’ve ever had.

New comment by 46Bit in "Insider trader had all the answers"

46Bit — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 01:08:58 +0000

Ordering satellite imagery and counting cars is just a weekend project. The last time I looked at ordering imagery, the main obstacle was the minimum order size, so it'd actually scale better for monitoring every store car park than for looking at a single car park.

New comment by 46Bit in "Working in the office 5 days/week to build company culture is a myth: PwC report"

46Bit — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 02:14:41 +0000

> You can’t form relationships that way

Plenty of millenials and Gen Z can

We've been building groups online ever since we were little

New comment by 46Bit in "Ask HN: I miss the internet of the 90s/00s. What should I do?"

46Bit — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 17:25:58 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

New comment by 46Bit in "How we migrated Gov.uk notify to AWS elastic container service"

46Bit — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 11:41:13 +0000

It's pretty normal for ordinary government workloads in the UK, or at least it was at GDS. Using niche suppliers who cater to government paranoia is expensive, and they're usually much less mature than hyperscaler platforms. It's also open for debate whether those niche, inflexible suppliers result in a genuinely more hardened target or not.

New comment by 46Bit in "Redis is forked"

46Bit — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 17:52:59 +0000

Anecdotally, I know several teams likely to adopt OpenTofu when state encryption ships https://terrateam.io/blog/opentofu-feature-preview-state-enc...

New comment by 46Bit in "We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms"

46Bit — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 12:37:24 +0000

Umm, GOV.UK uses Google Analytics, Fastly CDN, AWS containers, and I believe is developing an app.

(I worked at GDS until two years ago.)

New comment by 46Bit in "Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust"

46Bit — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 15:06:45 +0000

Influx is a full time series database. It's less opinionated than Prometheus.

New comment by 46Bit in "Fighting API bots with Cloudflare's invisible turnstile"

46Bit — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 09:48:06 +0000

That looks like a misconfiguration by HIBP