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Comment by natch | Hacker News Reader

Fighter jet pilot is a self-avowed prankster and “class clown” (his words). One of the people who wrote the software for that radar system is his good buddy, best man at his wedding, and was on duty nearby on that day.

It could all be a big prank.

Some of the eyewitnesses saw what they saw on, wait for it, a radar screen. Well technically it was another technology not exactly radar but I forget the name. [edit: FLIR, which may or may not be a type of radar… I know as much about this as I know about little green men.] But color me unconvinced.

And sure there are other embellishments to the story but we really don’t know what’s real here and what’s not.

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Wait, how do the logistics of this prank work? His buddy patched the plane's software on the fly (ha!) without anyone else noticing? Or he inserted some "prank" code into the main codebase, got it past what I'm sure is ton of code review hurdles without anyone noticing, then got it deployed to the plane before his pilot friend took flight that day?

If you build a system, you'll know its flaws. A common flaw with radar systems is them detecting something that's not a plane as a plane - e.g., the sun over the horizon.

If he built the software that automatically rejects such mistaken identifications, he also knows in which situations you'll get a false positive reading, and can tell his friend the perfect timing for the prank.

Case dismissed, natch figured it out. Everyone go home and stop asking questions.

One might think such an elaborate prankster would keep his benign pranks to himself when going on a podcast tour to protect appearances.

Going on a podcast tour to protect appearances? One would think he went on the podcast tour to seek attention, as pranksters are wont to do.

I meant he probably wouldn't publicly talk about his pranking history on his podcast tour if he wants to con everyone.

I think there’s some subtlety there you’re missing, and that is that there’s is a kind of pleasure and prankster humor in revealing to the more perceptive subset of the audience that you pulled an epic con, while still keeping the con alive for another less perceptive subset.

For an example of this kind of prankster game see Woz’s short videos about how he sources (actually real, but he intentionally does not say that) two dollar bills in pads from a local printer “who gets them from another very high quality printer.” He knows some people get what he’s doing and others don’t, and that’s part of the fun.

And some people transition during the exposition from being people who are being duped, to people who realize they were temporarily duped. That’s another part of the fun.

Nor do you that there were any embellishments whatsoever.

Coincidence theory at its finest.

I know, right? Just by coincidence the little green men decided to single out some pranksters to reveal themselves to.

Definitely the most likely explanation. /s

Sure, so the best idea is clearly to just chalk it up to a prank and ignore it rather than try to prove it.

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