Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangsux | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Look, I’m all for someone being excited for something they’ve never explored before. There is a joy in personal discovery of things you see.

I’m not a fan of a fabricated premise in order to show “look how brilliant I am, I discovered RDS from first principles” when this mostly documented (1).

In contrast, look at the Mike Harrison Eidophor talk. The guy pieced together a history of a significant technology that is otherwise poorly recorded on the Internet (2). This is new and novel info.

(1) https://www.2wcom.com/fileadmin/redaktion/dokumente/Company/...

(2) https://hackaday.com/2016/04/19/mike-harrison-exposes-hot-oi...

I mean, she was pretty clear about why she found the signal, and that she read the RDS documentation in order to decode it, etc.

I think the more fun part was towards the end, when she brute-forced decryption keys for traffic information coordinates and also found the (AFAIK) non-standard Finnish bus stop time table information in another band and reverse-engineered that, and I think that was the takeaway of the talk.

Why does anyone need to? I would imagine billions of personal discoveries go unannounced every day. Is it a good use of resources to add more noise to world when you discover something that is already well documented? I don't think so, but then again everyone seems to have been trained to share personal discoveries like it's a grand discovery, for the sake of self advertising?

Did you see the video? There was one proprietary, weakly encrypted part that she discovered, cracked and documented.

Secondly, while individually each thing is independently documented (RDS, Nyquist criteria, sound cards, FSK/QPSK, etc), it is nice to see someone bring all of it together. Surely you don't mean to say that you have not relied on web resources to pull together a project, where one _could_ go to more primary sources, but you are thankful that someone showed you the way?

Like someone said, "Look around you. Everything is someone's passion project". I welcome everyone's passion project. It is not noise if I am interested.

Yes. Those discoveries can add context to things that are already "well-documented." I'd hate a world where's no information about topics other than official (tm) documentation. It's sometimes rediscovering things are that implicit knowledge by the people who made the documentation, because how could they consider anyone not knowing something so obvious.

Sharing and discovery is a fundamentally human act. It’s not noise. Celebrate people that want to learn, share and develop ideas.

Obligatory XKCD “Ten Thousand” https://xkcd.com/1053/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com