Hacker News: cameldrv

New comment by cameldrv in "447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane"

cameldrv — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:53:57 +0000

I have no idea if this is practical but I remember when flash memory was this suspicious semi-science fiction thing too. There are probably some people on this site that remember the same for DRAM. There have been loads of things in between that didn't make it. Some of them were semi-crackpot, some actually went into production like bubble memory and Optane. Few of them have met the sweet spot of the market in a way that let them move from a niche to a dominant form of memory, but still I wouldn't discount that it's possible to invent a new form of memory that will take over the world!

New comment by cameldrv in "The Seasons Are Wrong"

cameldrv — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:52:20 +0000

Yeah there are "climatological seasons." The Earth heats up over time, as you say, so the longest day of the year is not generally the hottest day. Climatological summer is June/July/August. The Romans and many other northern hemisphere cultures marked summer as starting before the solstice. I'm not sure when we got the idea that Summer was supposed to start on the solstice.

New comment by cameldrv in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

cameldrv — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:32:34 +0000

I did it back in college too. We had a great club that really catered to students. It was $ 14 for a 2000 ft tow, and $99/yr for a membership, that included all glider rental for the lower performance ships (Schweizers). The instructors were volunteers, but you had to wait. There was a signup sheet, and the first one to get to the field got the first flight.

Weight wise I was skinny back then and it wasn’t a problem. I soloed my first full year and got my license the next year.

New comment by cameldrv in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

cameldrv — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:59:09 +0000

Flying sailplanes/gliders. Once you get good at it, you can fly hundreds of miles (or more) by understanding the weather and figuring out where the air is going up. Lots of opportunities to nerd out. Aerodynamics, weather forecasting, remote sensing, in-flight user interfaces, strategy, communications, and also just satisfying to figure out how to coax the atmosphere to get you somewhere for free.

New comment by cameldrv in "Understanding the Kalman filter with a simple radar example"

cameldrv — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:34:38 +0000

Huge +1 for Roger Labbe's book/jupyter notebooks. They really helped me grok Kalman filters but also the more general problem and the various approaches that approximate the general problem from different directions.

New comment by cameldrv in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

cameldrv — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:18:21 +0000

One factor is that it's known that he controls the wallet with many billions of dollars in it. That would make him a target for kidnapping/extortion/etc. He could have easily kept mining under a different address though and become very wealthy aside from the main wallet.

New comment by cameldrv in "Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

cameldrv — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:36:59 +0000

Yeah the whole production of the launch broadcast was pretty lousy compared to what SpaceX does. Their mission tracker website isn't working either. Considering that this broadcast and the other public affairs stuff is essentially the deliverable of the mission, it's not too great.

New comment by cameldrv in "Government agencies buy commercial data about Americans in bulk"

cameldrv — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:20:31 +0000

The state of the art has advanced so far in doing this. I remember way back in 2017, 9 years ago now, at the Scaled ML conference, Claudia Perlich gave a presentation about using RTB data to target ads. When she got to slide 23 [1] my jaw hit the floor. This was a small ad targeting company, and again, 9 years ago. Here's what they publicly said they had:

Consumer Events:

• 100B DailyEvents

• 20+ data integrations

• Clickstream

• App usage

• Ecommerce sales

• Cash register sales

• Precise Location

Context Data:

• User

• Device

• Location

• URL

• IP

• 200 Million Devices Daily

Universal DataStore

• 50 Trillion Record Consumer History

That's about 150,000 datapoints on everyone in the U.S. For a small company. In 2017.

[1] https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/6212008/ScaledML%20Media%20Ar...

New comment by cameldrv in "The Resolv hack: How one compromised key printed $23M"

cameldrv — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 05:28:30 +0000

Yeah. Sorry to say, but if you’re going to run a crypto company, and it’s even moderately successful, people are going to try to steal the key. Either you are extremely paranoid, or you’re going to lose a bunch of money, for yourselves or your investors.

New comment by cameldrv in "The Resolv hack: How one compromised key printed $23M"

cameldrv — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:11:26 +0000

You shouldn't have a key that controls millions/billions of dollars on a cloud service. It should be on an airgapped laptop that was purchased anonymously, has never been connected to the Internet, and only runs software that has been vetted and loaded onto it via a CD-ROM or some other comparable method.

New comment by cameldrv in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

cameldrv — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:20:31 +0000

That seems unusual to me. It’s common at smaller airports, but for a big one like LaGuardia I’d think tower and ground would be two different controllers, even lateish at night like this was. I know there has been a staffing problem for controllers in the NY area for some time.

New comment by cameldrv in "Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout"

cameldrv — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:19:39 +0000

This is almost universal in aviation. They always talk about the "accident chain." Essentially everything that can kill you with one mistake is illegal through training and operational requirements and engineering and maintenance regulations.

New comment by cameldrv in "Tesla: Failure of the FSD's degradation detection system [pdf]"

cameldrv — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:27:04 +0000

Yes but we now have very detailed topographical maps of the moon, and the GNC systems are way better. I expect they will carefully choose the exact landing spot and hit it within 10m or so. Certainly it lacks the heroism of eyeballing a good place to set down with 60 seconds of gas in the tank.

New comment by cameldrv in "Tesla: Failure of the FSD's degradation detection system [pdf]"

cameldrv — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:18:28 +0000

I once saw a presentation I think from one of the Argo ai guys with a greatest hits reel of the long tail of driving. One of them was a stake bed truck with a bunch of pigs in the back, and the back gate opened up and the pigs were falling onto the highway and running around injured. Most people will experience something at this level of unusualness at least a few times in their lives, so you have to be prepared to handle it.

New comment by cameldrv in "FBI is buying location data to track US citizens, director confirms"

cameldrv — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:13:41 +0000

The RTB thing has been around for over a decade at this point. What I’m not sure about is what’s being sold by car companies. I know they sell the data to insurance companies. I’m curious if the government can manage to get it as well commercially.

New comment by cameldrv in "Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink"

cameldrv — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 20:55:11 +0000

It's not clear to me that the radar is necessarily a separate constellation. SpaceX hasn't said a whole lot, but for example, SpaceX sells "Starshield" comms to the military, which uses the Starlink satellites for communications, except apparently the military has separate ground stations.

There's also been some published work where people have been talking about using Starlink signals passively for aircraft tracking. I'm not sure you couldn't use Starlink as a "stealth radar", in that the waveforms that are coming out of the satellites look like normal communications, but the satellites can also look at the echoes. Having the entire Starlink constellation form the radar is also pretty attractive from a cost and resiliency perspective since there are so many satellites to shoot down.

New comment by cameldrv in "Palantir defends its role in the kill chain"

cameldrv — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:37:21 +0000

There were a lot of protests over the Iraq war when Congress was voting on it, but Congress hasn’t had a role this time. Who would the protesters be trying to influence?

New comment by cameldrv in "Militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink"

cameldrv — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:31:28 +0000

I think also underappreciated is that Starlink can be used for purposes other than communication. It's already physically capable of acting as a giant radar, and SpaceX has gotten a missile tracking contract, and the E-7 wedgetail radar plane has been cancelled, which the DoD had publicly said was because it is obsolete given what's possible from space. It could be that they're planning on launching another radar constellation, but my guess is that it's already up there and it's called Starlink.

New comment by cameldrv in "Universal vaccine against respiratory infections and allergens"

cameldrv — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:17:22 +0000

No but it’s very good. Just upregulating an already existing system is the sort of thing that can evolve very quickly if there’s a big benefit to survival.

New comment by cameldrv in "Universal vaccine against respiratory infections and allergens"

cameldrv — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 05:02:23 +0000

This seems too good to be true. Respiratory infections kill and debilitate a lot of people. If cranking up the innate immune system all the time reduced illness with no downsides, you'd think evolution would have done it already, but it didn't, which makes me think there's probably a downside, and the fact that the innate immune system is only cranked up when a pathogen is detected is probably because the downside is worth it in the presence of a pathogen but not otherwise.