Hacker News: ballooney

New comment by ballooney in "First Robotic Satellite Servicer Launched"

ballooney — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:27:20 +0000

Almost all the ‘servicing’ and ‘orbital debris cleanup’ robot-arm sats are funded quite heavily by military end users, because there is really no market for their stated aims and a huge market for the unstated aims - flying up to an adversary’s satellite and messing it up. Open secret in the industry.

New comment by ballooney in "Sam Neill has died"

ballooney — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:38:35 +0000

I have rarely had such displeasure from hearing such an interesting interviewee having to cope with such a cretinous interviewer. I’m very surprised you recommended this.

New comment by ballooney in "Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off"

ballooney — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 16:21:01 +0000

In no way whatsoever, for low power devices.

New comment by ballooney in "Ask HN: How do you get into a flow state when using AI to code?"

ballooney — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:46:33 +0000

I don't know, I get runner's high and want to go running again a couple of days later.

New comment by ballooney in "Ask HN: How do you get into a flow state when using AI to code?"

ballooney — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:32:57 +0000

Do something better with your life. Honestly, not /s. Your brain is trying to tell you something.

New comment by ballooney in "There's still no point in gigabit broadband"

ballooney — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:23:48 +0000

For a proper distributed internet it seemed like a good idea, but silicon valley has rather scorched the earth, and so it’s not that useful for passively consuming slop and adverts.

New comment by ballooney in "YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken"

ballooney — Wed, 06 May 2026 06:27:12 +0000

The chinese colonies love opium, engagement is through the roof.

New comment by ballooney in "Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat"

ballooney — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:21:17 +0000

I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?

New comment by ballooney in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

ballooney — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:05:54 +0000

What he means and you're interpreting a bit too literally is that this [heatshield] is one subsystem where the risks are not well understood or quantified as, say, the propulsion system, for which we have a lot more experience and flight heritage.

New comment by ballooney in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

ballooney — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:28:25 +0000

Bayes rule has existed for nearly 300 years, there is no excuse for ‘only look[ing] at this data’ and that is NEVER a reasonable thing to do.

New comment by ballooney in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

ballooney — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:13:29 +0000

You’d need a load of additional propellant to insert yourself into the same orbit as the ISS on your return, which would have an exponential effect on the amount of propellant needed in the first place to get all this lot out to the moon. It would be a different vehicle.

New comment by ballooney in "Garry Tan's Claude Code Setup"

ballooney — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:48:59 +0000

In the last 60 days I have written over 600,000 lines of production code

No you haven't.

New comment by ballooney in "Jeff Bezos wants Washington Post’s newsroom budget halved, productivity doubled"

ballooney — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:06:33 +0000

About the same as Bezos invested in the Melania documentary, watched by about six people.

New comment by ballooney in "First Website (1992)"

ballooney — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:11:35 +0000

Everyone in silicon valley would do well to remember why the web was built (by other people, elsewhere).

New comment by ballooney in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

ballooney — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:32:51 +0000

What are your favourite active irc channels for technical hobbies?

New comment by ballooney in "Same Radio, Different Citizens"

ballooney — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 06:49:55 +0000

For context, the Cosmos Institute an AI lobbying business. [it flatters itself otherwise but that’s not atypical of the form]

New comment by ballooney in "Evolving OpenAI's Structure"

ballooney — Mon, 05 May 2025 19:29:52 +0000

Hopelessly over-idealistic premise. Sama and pg have never been anything other than opportunistic muck. This will be my last ever comment on HN.

New comment by ballooney in "David Tong Lectures on Theoretical Physics"

ballooney — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:51:04 +0000

WTF?

[Tang notes in-joke for potential downvoters]

New comment by ballooney in "The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state"

ballooney — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 12:49:31 +0000

No!

“they must do _something_ that makes their users want to use it.”

Is fentanyl acting in the interests of its addicts?

New comment by ballooney in "The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state"

ballooney — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 05:02:52 +0000

How could you _possibly_ believe a company like meta would use a new technology to act in your interests rather than theirs?