Hacker News: notfish

New comment by notfish in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

notfish — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:37:22 +0000

you can’t see the majority of starlinks with the naked eye, what you’re seeing is either some other constellation or freshly launches starlinks that are still orbit raising. once starlinks are at altitude they actively manage their reflection angles to avoid bouncing light back at earth

New comment by notfish in "Level S4 solar radiation event"

notfish — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:07:37 +0000

Had to stay up until 2am shutting down our spacecraft. Stupid sun hates to see me get a solid night’s sleep.

New comment by notfish in "Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts"

notfish — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 05:11:35 +0000

My ex coworkers at spacex are pretty damn motivated to get to mars, many of them despite all the Musking happening. I wouldn’t bet against them.

New comment by notfish in "Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks"

notfish — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 08:12:09 +0000

Yeah I’ve wanted to build this for ages (and have tried a couple times). The use case is festivals/sporting events and other places where permanent infrastructure doesn’t really exist. The hard part is keeping messages small if you wanna include any of the token tech you’re talking about - probably, a system where your payment for usage is that you be an active relay node is more effective. Something something trust models, ala existing cert signing models.

New comment by notfish in "Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks"

notfish — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 08:07:24 +0000

Its best for places like football games or festivals, where the traditional network gets overrun

New comment by notfish in "NASA's Lucy Spacecraft Completes Asteroid Donaldjohanson Flyby"

notfish — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 18:31:49 +0000

Wild. I was in my 4th/5th years of college during the pandemic and had an internship writing mission planning tooling for lucy. Felt like either two weeks or ten years, coding on the couch while we were pretty sure the world was ending outside. Bizarre times.

New comment by notfish in "Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)"

notfish — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 21:06:02 +0000

Don’t do this, it makes it a huge pain to test bar().

When you write the initial code to figure out bar, just throw that code in a unit test so you can run it any time. Stop throwing tests away!

New comment by notfish in "AstroForge selects target for “high risk, seat of the pants” asteroid mission"

notfish — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 18:21:34 +0000

The target market is the same as normal mining, you probably mine platinum. The cost probably only closes with either starship or mining fuel in space.

New comment by notfish in "Test if a number is even"

notfish — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 06:30:12 +0000

In what languages is n % 2 -1 for negative odd numbers?

Edit: apparently JS, java, and C all do this. That’s horrifying

New comment by notfish in "OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB"

notfish — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 19:02:38 +0000

An algorithm is “a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer”

How does a giant pile of linear algebra not meet that definition?

New comment by notfish in "SpaceX Super Heavy splashes down in the gulf, canceling chopsticks landing"

notfish — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 01:01:14 +0000

If you had spacex’s budget you could make all of these things happen

New comment by notfish in "Newton's financial misadventures in the South Sea Bubble (2018)"

notfish — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 23:39:01 +0000

The audiobooks are pretty well narrated too, great for anyone who needs 160 hours of audio

New comment by notfish in "Brazil blocks Starlink bank accounts"

notfish — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 21:10:03 +0000

Musk owns 79% of voting shares of spacex (but yes, only 42% of equity). I guess it depends on your definition of “owns”, but its not unreasonable to say he owns spacex.

New comment by notfish in "Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway"

notfish — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 15:57:25 +0000

What? Carbonaceous chondrites (the toyota corolla of asteroids) are like .1ppm gold, whereas Earth’s crust is ~0.005ppm

https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1968/0603/report.pdf

New comment by notfish in "Ask HN: How do browsers isolate internal audio from microphone input?"

notfish — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 23:26:58 +0000

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if early heat seeking missiles used just a PID controller, since a big part of what makes PID attractive is the ability to implement it with electrical components. Take a pair of IR photodiodes and wire them such that their difference is the error of your PID control, wire the output of the PID to the steering on your missile, and suddenly you have a missile that points at the nearest IR target (on one axis of course).

Modern missiles do better than this, but a missile wired this way with a proximity fuse would hit the target a reasonable amount of the time. Not silly at all if you haven’t invented microcontrollers yet.

New comment by notfish in "Can men live without war? (1956)"

notfish — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 05:42:19 +0000

I’d just prefer the survival rate not drop to zero for everyone at the same time.

New comment by notfish in "ADHD traits were an advantage in evolution"

notfish — Tue, 28 May 2024 01:15:25 +0000

They can be used as a single person genderless pronoun.

New comment by notfish in "Seven Dyson Sphere Candidates"

notfish — Sun, 19 May 2024 07:39:39 +0000

The idea is that, because of the risk of a technological explosion, any sentient species is a threat.

I don’t really buy the idea though - cooperation has been the strongest strength of humanity and is one of our greatest evolutionary edges. Why wouldn’t that apply on the interstellar scale too?

New comment by notfish in "Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora"

notfish — Sat, 11 May 2024 01:15:47 +0000

This is the biggest storm since 2003! We hit a G5 on the SWPC geomagnetic storm reading, and my team had to power down components on our satellites to keep them safe!

New comment by notfish in "White House wants Moon to have its own time zone, Coordinated Lunar Time (CLT)"

notfish — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 16:53:23 +0000

There isn’t really a “why”, other than the need to match observed reality.

We know from observations that light moves at a constant speed, even when the observer is moving near the speed of light, and we know that this observation is true regardless of your frame of reference.

In order for physics to remain consistent while accounting for the constant speed of light, other things need to flex between the two reference frames: namely, time (time dilation) and length (Lorentz contraction).