Hacker News: decker

New comment by decker in "Apocalypse Early Warning System"

decker — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:50:28 +0000

Fun idea of a metric, but if I'm reading this correctly, we get roughly one apocalypse warning per year?

> Level 5 is calibrated so only the highest daily peak in the trailing year should exceed it.

New comment by decker in "High-power microwave defeats drone swarm"

decker — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:02:08 +0000

The starting cost for a drone show is around $20k USD, so it wouldn't be hard to fake what they are doing. It's hard to say if this a functioning system that can take down drone swarms, or someone is testing the market for a system that can.

New comment by decker in "Pocket 4: Modular full-featured Handheld AI PC"

decker — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 05:05:34 +0000

This would be pretty nice to carry around during oncall shifts, albeit, probably not the most productive device to have in the event you get paged.

New comment by decker in "How do you recognize an expert?"

decker — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 18:27:35 +0000

Save you some time, this post never answers the question in the title.

New comment by decker in "The English cottage where John le Carré wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

decker — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 06:17:07 +0000

I find this building's title of cottage preposterous, this is a mere hovel if I've ever seen one.

New comment by decker in "Knife Throwing Machine (2022) [video]"

decker — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 16:34:22 +0000

Pretty neat, but I wish they would have emphasized safety a bit more and put up a full sheet of plywood behind the target.

New comment by decker in "Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills"

decker — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 06:41:48 +0000

This would have been perfect if it ended a paragraph earlier.

New comment by decker in "Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield, who revolutionized neuroimaging"

decker — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 19:41:10 +0000

It's unfortunate that he went back to work instead of quitting and filing patents on the device.

New comment by decker in "Scientists urged Wisconsin to limit its wolf kill. It didn’t go well"

decker — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 05:11:16 +0000

The deer lobby must be strong in Wisconsin.

New comment by decker in "Embarrassed by your Olympic javelin: did cavemen do it better? (2012)"

decker — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 04:45:32 +0000

I'm surprised the article didn't mention the atlatl which would have been the true historic answer to "how far did cavemen throw spears?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower

New comment by decker in "Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over his rare Twitter handle"

decker — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 04:36:21 +0000

Does a swat team have to show up for it to be swatting?

New comment by decker in "I made a mistake with Terraform and Azure made it worse"

decker — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 06:46:33 +0000

After working with declarative systems for some time now (terraform, kubernetes), I've concluded that things will generally be declarative, but you're bound to run into edge cases where the imperative nature of the underlying system bleeds through and shows up as a gotcha for some reason or other. For kubernetes, I've found that people tend to have to name YAML files in the order in which they should be applied for things to work properly. A more devious case involves kubernetes ConfigMaps getting updated in place via apply while the deployment fails to recognize that the environment variables for the pod have now changed and need to be restated. I suppose this could be chalked up to the idea that all declarative systems need to be functional and each resource should be immutable, however, that's never how it evolves in practice. In short, it's all been quite a disillusioning journey through the general promise of not needing to worry about ordering that eventually results in ordering being the hardest problem that the system faces.

New comment by decker in "Google Internal Comics"

decker — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 06:35:53 +0000

Money.

New comment by decker in "My favourite C++ footgun"

decker — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 20:47:01 +0000

Sounds like the root cause was due to not obeying the rule of five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(C%2B%2B_program...

New comment by decker in "Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers"

decker — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 04:38:33 +0000

You sure there isn't someone there doing A/B experiments for motivating the pickers and having to choose whether or not to try motivating them with the message "how would you feel if you have to tell your children they don't get to eat because you didn't pick enough items."

New comment by decker in "How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? (2015)"

decker — Wed, 26 May 2021 06:28:12 +0000

From what I recall about compression, the artifacts are at the high frequencies which also tend to get muted with age / sound exposure. Rather than play the game of determining if you can hear the difference, are there any diagnostics that can work backwards and determine the max bit-rate one could benefit from when listening?

New comment by decker in "Human Antibodies Target Many Parts of Coronavirus Spike Protein"

decker — Sat, 22 May 2021 00:28:20 +0000

It's quite amazing how the human body has defense in depth to mitigate changes in protein shape due to mutations.

New comment by decker in "Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?"

decker — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 22:53:15 +0000

Did everyone stop using the internet and stick strictly to cash? If not, is it possible that someone made a purchase or search that may have related to what people who need nappies might buy or search for, but didn't realize it?

New comment by decker in "Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?"

decker — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 22:45:16 +0000

Did you do searches related to the condition that caused you to be prescribed Voltaren?

New comment by decker in "Stanford study: Covid-19 fatality rate ~0.15%"

decker — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 02:45:43 +0000

I'd like to see a study on the percentage of people who's heart, lungs, or brain got filled with micro clots and now have permanent damage. The serious effects of COVID need to be taken into consideration as well if we are talking about risks involved with getting it.