Hacker News: laverya

New comment by laverya in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

laverya — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 12:41:23 +0000

Do those people actually _repair_ hardware, or do they swap bad hardware for good chips?

Can SpaceX not just say "OK, GPU #7 on satellite #15872 is broken, don't use it" and just accept that they're now overbuilt on power/cooling for that sat?

New comment by laverya in "Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah"

laverya — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 02:24:32 +0000

Australia and the UK are commonly used in the US gun control debate as places where gun confiscation worked, and CA/HI are the states with the most restrictive gun control policies.

My response was meant to illustrate that this was essentially not a "preventable gun death", or at least not preventable by any level of gun control ever implemented in a Western country. Similarly, the assassination of Shinzo Abe using a homemade pistol/blunderbuss was not a preventable gun death.

New comment by laverya in "Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah"

laverya — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 22:50:39 +0000

Agreed, but the difference in the use of rifles in assassination attempts between the US and UK/EU/AUS/etc can't purely be because of a lack of gun control in the US if the same rifles are available in those other countries too. (semiautomatic military style rifles like used in the first attempt on Trump are almost always more restricted overseas, but again this was only a single shot and could easily have been from a bolt-action rifle)

New comment by laverya in "Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah"

laverya — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 22:38:16 +0000

Even California and Hawaii don't ban hunting rifles. Same with Australia and the UK. Can you name a single country that totally bans the ownership of all firearms and enforces it? Would you like to live there?

(The rifle used isn't known yet, but only one shot was fired)

New comment by laverya in "Proposed NOAA Budget Kills Program Designed to Prevent Satellite Collisions"

laverya — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 20:09:12 +0000

Yeah except for arpanet, GPS, satellites in general, jet engines, composites, computers, and everything that came from there... What has military r&d ever done for us?

New comment by laverya in "Amelia Earhart's Reckless Final Flights"

laverya — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 14:45:02 +0000

Not to mention "just fly east" will get you to land just fine from Hawaii. It might not be the land you were looking for, but it will be land - so even if the direction finding failed the error would be survivable.

New comment by laverya in "Amelia Earhart's Reckless Final Flights"

laverya — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 18:11:57 +0000

Compare that to computers, which had been around for the best part of 40 years... in 1980.

New comment by laverya in "Why does the U.S. always run a trade deficit?"

laverya — Tue, 20 May 2025 19:13:54 +0000

> The best national security is for it to be in the interest of the counter party to trade with you rather than attack you.

Sure, but if your biggest export is your country's particular flavor of monopoly money, is it actually in your counterparty's best interests to trade with you?

New comment by laverya in "Charlie Javice convicted of defrauding JPMorgan in $175M startup sale"

laverya — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 05:13:01 +0000

I had one at University of Michigan, but that was almost a decade ago now.

New comment by laverya in "Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching our shores"

laverya — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 12:07:05 +0000

Third world countries unironically have bigger militaries than Canada.

Certainly Iraq pre-invasion made them look like a pushover!

That's not to say that invading would be painless, but let's not pretend that Canada would have a chance.

New comment by laverya in "DOGE as a National Cyberattack"

laverya — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 01:34:28 +0000

Has everyone forgotten the lessons of open-source cryptography all of a sudden? Just because the systems are public does not mean that they are vulnerable, and "security through obscurity" is no security at all.

New comment by laverya in "DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency"

laverya — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 17:30:26 +0000

> You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments.

"Good" news then, this is already the case! Or should very much be assumed to be the case, following the various GSA hacks.

New comment by laverya in "Trump slaps tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China"

laverya — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:00:57 +0000

The tariffs on Canada have now been paused after a promise to enhance border security (which was reportedly already in the works)

So who knows at this point

New comment by laverya in "Trump slaps tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China"

laverya — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 04:06:06 +0000

The official statement from the White House calls out increased fentanyl production in Canada as the reason - but doesn't say that it's the majority of imports, you're right. The twitter summary says "There is growing production of fentanyl in Canada, and enough fentanyl was seized at the northern border last fiscal year to kill 9.8 million Americans.", though, and that seems like a lot.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1885812342526460184

New comment by laverya in "Trump slaps tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China"

laverya — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 16:50:33 +0000

What I've been seeing is people saying that Canada is the source for most fentanyl coming into the US, not Mexico.

(This is also the US's stated reason for tariffs on Canada)

New comment by laverya in "Trump slaps tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China"

laverya — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 16:49:18 +0000

97. Well, I guess the US is one of the countries best able to implement Autarky today, so let's give it a try!

Trade makes things more efficient. Trade gives access to resources not available otherwise. Trade allows greater economies of scale, and production efficiencies via comparative advantage.

Trade is also not fundamentally necessary for the US in the way it is for essentially every other country on the planet, because the US is large enough, diverse enough, and resource rich enough to (with a fair bit of pain!) survive on our own.

I do not think it will come to that, but it is true.

New comment by laverya in "Starship Flight 7"

laverya — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:36:37 +0000

Most rockets flew test flights before sticking people inside the same model, but most rockets are also single use and so each stack is fundamentally new.

A future starship could plausibly be the first rocket to fly to space unmanned, return, and then fly humans to space!

New comment by laverya in "Why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited?"

laverya — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 23:38:06 +0000

Imagine you're an ISP. If your customer has slow bandwidth to some random website, they will blame the website. If they have a slow connection to YouTube, they will blame you.

So YouTube gets more favorable terms on transit bandwidth than the random site does.

New comment by laverya in "A pilot crashed a full passenger jet into the bay, didn't lose his job (2021)"

laverya — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 03:20:26 +0000

General aviation stats might not be entirely applicable to commercial aviation, of course. The planes are less redundant, less well maintained, and flown by less experienced crew - it's hard to tell which of those factors will tend to dominate, or whether they cancel out.

New comment by laverya in "Student rocket group shatters amateur space record"

laverya — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 23:25:23 +0000

You only need to be moving ~7.5-8km/s, but getting to orbit tends to take 9.5-10km/s of total delta-v due to needing to ascend, aerodynamic drag, and other losses.