Hacker News: dabluecaboose

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

dabluecaboose — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:50:37 +0000

"Anomaly" is one of those words that, in the space industry, can mean anything from "Our payload isn't behaving as well as we're expecting" to "Someone stepped on it" to "A rock hit it"

You can use it to describe literally anything that's off nominal. It's fantastic.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

dabluecaboose — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:24:22 +0000

The cool thing about geostationary orbits is that they're far enough out that they get 24/7 sun (Except around the equinoxes). We could easily fit a solar worship break in the schedule in between imaging and momentum dumps.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

dabluecaboose — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:46:42 +0000

Hah originally making an animation was my plan, but as so often happens it fell on the backburner and then I ended up with a massive archive. I just deleted it once I realized that A) Better archives exist elsewhere and B) I wasn't going to do anything with it.

I still have the script somewhere. I should throw an LLM at it and see if I can't sand off a few rough edges.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

dabluecaboose — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:43:01 +0000

They're concerned because GOES-19 deployed with the newest Rothschild Space Weather Laser, which could disrupt their atmospheric camouflage

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

dabluecaboose — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:41:29 +0000

We don't need a bloated React framework to show a plaintext file with the fuel tank levels. It's NOAA, not Microsoft.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

dabluecaboose — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:36:39 +0000

Looking at the timestamp, that's from yesterday. Nominal product delivery happens ~every 10 minutes.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

dabluecaboose — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:33:18 +0000

Former GOES engineer here. At this point I'd almost be surprised if 19 didn't have something go wrong. We had issues on almost every other satellite. GOES-17 had the loop heat pipe anomaly(Supposedly from someone stepping on it in the cleanroom...), GOES-15 (IIRC) had a micrometeorite strike, and GOES-13 had a fuel tank anomaly right before deorbit.

GOES-16 and GOES-17 are on-orbit spares, so in the extremely unlikely event of a total failure there's at least another spacecraft on-orbit ready to take up station.

That said, I have every faith in the GOES team to get to the bottom of this. They're the best, and I often wish I was back there working with them.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

dabluecaboose — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:29:32 +0000

While it may not be flashy, I personally find the GOES sites extremely useful. Things are often simply placed at obvious and expected URLs, so scraping or monitoring is extremely easy.

I wrote the script that provides the GOES NavSum [1] and it pretty much just builds a standardized text file and drops it in the folder. The neat thing is that this makes it really easy to programmatically scrape and parse the data.

I wrote a personal script at one point that would download the GOES-EAST CONUS image and both EAST and WEST full disk images and composite them into a wallpaper. At one point my server had 500GB of archived GOES imagery. I liked to joke with my former coworkers that I could report image anomalies before they notice because my desktop wallpaper would change every 10 minutes.

[1] https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/resources/cemscs/navsum.txt

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

dabluecaboose — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:25:48 +0000

> Please note: This status information on this website is generally updated on a monthly basis. Recent outages and anomalies on data flow are highlighted at the top of the page.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals"

dabluecaboose — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 21:38:15 +0000

> He was a cancer on Reddit and I’m sure he still exists under different monikers. But now there are 100s of gallowboobs.

Yep, for example: If you mention the name "TurboStrider27" on /r/Games, your comment gets shadowbanned.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Mechanical Watch (2022)"

dabluecaboose — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:45:06 +0000

The term GP was looking for is "Caseback Knife":

https://diplomatwinders.com/cdn/shop/products/55035knife_102...

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Techno-libertarians are flocking to the Caribbean"

dabluecaboose — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:57:49 +0000

Great stuff! Apologies for the snark before, there weren't many comments and I was miffed that one of the few was so short. I stepped outside my office into the sun right after posting and felt ridiculous. Go outside, people!

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Techno-libertarians are flocking to the Caribbean"

dabluecaboose — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:02:55 +0000

> Did you sincerely believe that the parent poster was suggesting bear-overrun as a probable outcome?

Gee, maybe they should have written a comment explaining their point of view that we could then discuss, instead of a quippy, dismissive one-liner! Then, we could be discussing the likely pitfalls of this endeavor instead of circlejerking over a Vox piece.

> If you understood correctly, then your response is an example of the same thing you're complaining about.

You reap what you sow.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "USB Power Delivery: Plugging into the Benefits"

dabluecaboose — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 03:43:32 +0000

Looks more like the 368, but yeah. Good call!

Sounds like the juice may not be worth the squeeze on a USB-C refresh if I have to use an A-to-C cable for it anyway

New comment by dabluecaboose in "USB Power Delivery: Plugging into the Benefits"

dabluecaboose — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:07:06 +0000

Oh man, please tell me it wasn't the CC GP-7. I have the micro version and have been hemhawwing about updating it.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models"

dabluecaboose — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:56:15 +0000

> - Semi-automatic and automatic weapons weren't available to the public

They were fully available to the public. Automatic weapons were tax-gated, but still were (and are!) available, after 1934. Semi-automatic weapons have been freely available to any citizen pretty much since they were invented (circa 1893).

New comment by dabluecaboose in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

dabluecaboose — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:26:53 +0000

Hah, my work-issued laptop has that one as well. Power button should never be inline with normal keys, IMO.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

dabluecaboose — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:55:41 +0000

The Das keyboard commits the sin of having a sleep button (why is it even on the keyboard??) right next to the media controls. I've accidentally hit that multiple times when trying to change my music.

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Buy a train, bridge or tracks from the Swiss Railway"

dabluecaboose — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:34:43 +0000

There are clubs[1][2] of owners, and they'll generally rent them out to people. We looked into doing it for my bachelor party. Unfortunately, the cost is akin to renting a yacht for the same amount of time (On the order of thousands per day, minimum), so we quickly shelved that plan for an AirBnB.

[1] https://www.aaprco.com/

[2] https://www.rpca.com/

New comment by dabluecaboose in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

dabluecaboose — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:26:54 +0000

> one of the rare shooters with a female protagonist

No, this isn't a Perfect Dark game