Hacker News: plugger

New comment by plugger in "BYD sold more EVs last month than the US did all quarter"

plugger — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 06:47:44 +0000

I've been daily driving a BYD Shark I purchased outright in February and I couldn't disagree with you more. The interior is well built and well thought out. I have rocker switches that compliment my touch screen.

Oh, and my midsize pickup is averaging 122MPG as it's a PHEV. My ongoing costs for driving have been decimated by buying this thing.

New comment by plugger in "The Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2B into the Midterms"

plugger — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 06:01:00 +0000

Because they're greedy and self absorbed.

New comment by plugger in "Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers"

plugger — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 07:12:52 +0000

"Work to live, don't live to work". When you're on your deathbed work won't sit there with you and hold your hand. People are critical, not buildings or computers or networks. If you do choose to go down the path of overwork for recognition (as I did in my early 20s to earn a business visa) set strict guidelines around it and ensure you benefit as much as your employer. No one will manage your own work life balance better than you.

New comment by plugger in "YouTuber builds 'Flock-like' camera to track police vehicles, gets police visit"

plugger — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 02:15:34 +0000

Same with Australia, individual free speech is not formally protected in legislation.

New comment by plugger in "Testing 12 different Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors"

plugger — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:54:05 +0000

I run HA solely in my wine cellar, it's exceedingly useful to have an indoor hydrometer monitoring my conditions. I run 3 in different parts of my wine cellar.

New comment by plugger in "The Mars Delusion"

plugger — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:18:47 +0000

Mars pretty much always loses out when compared to a Moon colony or actual space colonies that can be designed to produce earth-like gravitation.

Once that's sorted/well understood it makes sense to travel further out into the Solar System. Until then, it's just unnecessary risk.

New comment by plugger in "AI, ex-Soviet engineers, and the Holy Grail of rocketry"

plugger — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:15:47 +0000

In May SMILE was launched. It's a collaboration between ESA and CSA. I expect more of this to develop given the US trajectory currently.

New comment by plugger in "AI, ex-Soviet engineers, and the Holy Grail of rocketry"

plugger — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 01:24:12 +0000

ITAR is for US persons ONLY. SpaceX services the global market, as does China. Sure, NRO won't be launching on a Chinese stack but it'd be a bit foolish to think commercial launch consumers wouldn't look at the top two launch providers to decide who they'll pay to launch their payload.

New comment by plugger in "The world may have less time than it thinks on climate change"

plugger — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 02:08:43 +0000

China's emissions peaked in 2025 and have been declining since. They have rolled out massive amounts of renewables, unlike the US.

New comment by plugger in "Y Combinator's Ankit Gupta faces backlash over H-1B comments"

plugger — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:51:02 +0000

It legitimately cooks my brain that the son of Nimarata Randhawa is arguing with Ankit Gupta about whether prioritising hiring of American workers is DEI.

New comment by plugger in "Sailors on USS Lincoln outside Iran are exhausted and suffering from poor morale"

plugger — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 01:46:37 +0000

Food maybe, but morale on the Ford was reportedly quite low and there has been some conjecture that the fire that has knocked it out of service was not accidental.

New comment by plugger in "AI is a bubble, just like dot-com"

plugger — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:59:22 +0000

yes, but it was still a bubble as 99 of those companies went bust. AI is an obvious bubble, and it will soon burst. The question is what survives. If you can predict that, you can also make bank.

New comment by plugger in "Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time"

plugger — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 07:28:47 +0000

Obviously I would have forgotten most of this given the change was 20 years ago but IIRC DST config on Solaris at the time was statically coded. You could modify the timezone config as a hacky fix on Solaris 8 but the permanent fix involved recompiling zic.

New comment by plugger in "Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)"

plugger — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 06:31:49 +0000

I live in Western Australia. for 3 years we trialed DST from 2006 to 2009. It was a nightmare personally, I was a sysadmin at the time and enterprise management tools were expensive and crap so we had to roll out DST file changes across our fleet manually. And because the change to allow DST for our region was a rushed job we then had to roll back after the 3 year unsuccessful trial.

Honestly, it was super stressful at the time. And DST that doesn't exist doesn't bother you in the slightest. Every day ends and flows into the next like the last. But the stress of a clock change twice a year doesn't have to happen, it's a choice.

New comment by plugger in "Flipper One Tech Specs"

plugger — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:19:13 +0000

This is where I land as well, except I'd go higher. Ukraine has caused the pricing of any FPGA equipped SDR to skyrocket.

Plus incredibly high sample rates that the sSDR supports would likely result in a lot of drops in sampling due to sustained throughput issues of the device itself. You'd be surprised how much dropping occurs on even fairly modern/grunty machines. I used to record X band weather satellite baseband on a HP Dev One and ended up using a ramdisk for baseband recording as the PCIe 2.0 bus wasn't able to handle the sustained write speeds once the nvme drive's buffer was maxed out. Basically anything above 30Msps would go to RAM.

As strong as the lure is of a cute RF device, I've never bought a flipper as I couldn't justify it given the multitude of other SDRs and radio hardware I have. EG RFNM, BladeRF 2.0 xA4, hackRF clone, RTL-SDRs and NESDRs, as well as a YardStick.

New comment by plugger in "SpaceX punts Starship launch as investigation opens into Starbase worker's death"

plugger — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:07:39 +0000

3x higher than other rocket builders. Comparing a rocket factory to a construction site it borderline laughable.

New comment by plugger in "Iran hit more U.S. military targets than has been reported, satellite images"

plugger — Thu, 07 May 2026 06:42:14 +0000

Iran currently has tasking control of a single Chinese military spy satellite with sub meter resolution. They struck this arrangement before the war. This capability has provided them targeting/tasking info as well as post attack BDA capabilities.

The delay on commercial imagery purchase isn't to hinder Iran, it's to hinder our understanding of the conflict.

New comment by plugger in "Iran hit more U.S. military targets than has been reported, satellite images"

plugger — Thu, 07 May 2026 06:39:59 +0000

THAAD is the radar systems + missiles. The radar stayed, it was the interceptors that were pulled from Korea. I assume you can accept that to intercept a missile you need tracking and another missile in that system.

New comment by plugger in "Used La Marzocco machines are coveted by cafe owners and collectors"

plugger — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:44:02 +0000

You've got to disassemble the boiler and remove the scale from there. I run a Gaggia Classic at home with really hard water and my machine literally stopped flowing due to scale buildup. Once I fully pulled it apart and scraped all the scale out of the inside of the boiler it started running flawlessly.

https://greatinfusions.com/blog/great-infusions-coffee-blog/...

New comment by plugger in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

plugger — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:46:15 +0000

BO has entered the chat New Glenn and are arguably equal to Super Heavy given they've also recovered and reused their heavy booster.

I think you're going to be surprised at the level of competition BO provides SpaceX in the Artemis program.