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rfdave

65 karma · joined September 13, 2013

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rfdave··on Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden
PSA is not fool proof test, and is susceptible to false positives. A substantial fraction of men, in the 40+% range have prostate cancer at death. The treatments for it can be painful and have long recoveries, so there's not obvious solutions.
rfdave··on Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden
Believe me, we noticed that clearly at the time.
rfdave··on An AI-powered bulk SMS and messaging platform for 2025 marketing
More SMS spam about my overdue toll?
rfdave··on Ames Shovel and Tool Catalog of Shovels, Spades and Scoops (1926) [pdf]
Ploughing a field is a very different activity than moving material from one place to another.
rfdave··on Vaccine skeptic hired to head federal study of immunizations and autism
How many people with polio do you know? What’s her explanation of why polio almost disappeared after everyone was vaccinated? Couching a bunch of BS in “if she’s right” makes you sound like a shill.
rfdave··on An American Retiree Was Lost Off the Coast of Venezuela. Then Things Went Bad
Wow. Talk about zero situational awareness.
rfdave··on 'Price Gouging' After a Disaster Is Good for the Public
Ah, an economist from George Mason. Say no more. I expect he has no children due to the negative economic impact of child rearing.
rfdave··on How to debug your battery design
That's an urban legend. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
rfdave··on Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship
How is the typical person supposed to decide the best path of care? How do you incentivize competition while keeping standards of care up so that people receive good care with highly complex tradeoffs.
rfdave··on 300k airplanes in five years
Oh sure, but the Catholic Church didn't have to answer to a bunch of analysts whose only skill is fast excel spreadsheeting.
rfdave··on Teardown of the TM4313 GPS Disciplined Oscillator
I believe the GNURadio folks have implemented at least some of this, so it might be worth poking around GNURadio for a bit, Tags are what you're looking for.
rfdave··on High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
Not if there's only 5 documents.
rfdave··on Text generator: an Obsidian plugin that generates text using GPT-3 (OpenAI)
But will the computer add appropriate tagging and links?
rfdave··on Where Are the Microelectronics Engineers?
Perhaps it's because there's little skill overlap between hardware engineers and software engineers? Perhaps it's because they have different career goals and desires?
rfdave··on Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?
I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that human sacrifice is bad.
rfdave··on Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?
You're assuming that parents who are homeschooling intend to provide their children with a good education. However, what about people who claim to "homeschool" their children but don't actually follow through, leading to uneducated adults who can't support themselves. I think that assuming good intentions for everyone is a problematic assumption, and you need to manage policies for bad actors as well.
rfdave··on Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?
Why is that a problem?
rfdave··on Plane accidentally flew around the world (2018)
I'm pretty sure this wasn't an accident
rfdave··on It Will Be Years Before Raytheon Can Build New Stinger Missiles
Without comments like that, HN would have 1/3 of the total comment volume. I find it highly entertaining.
rfdave··on It Will Be Years Before Raytheon Can Build New Stinger Missiles
You've never developed any hardware have you? Patents aren't the problem.
rfdave··on Nuclear startup Oklo gets thumbs-down from regulators
Looking at the number of failed kickstarters for physical objects that are multiple orders of magnitude less complicated than a nuclear power plant with new technology might be instructive.
rfdave··on LimeSDR
It's inherently a broadband device, with no output filtering. No surprise that the output is full of harmonics. I built several application specific RF front ends for Ettus SDR's at a previous job, it's mandatory for any kind of professional use.
rfdave··on LimeSDR
One of many Govt focused RF companies. Start from Watkins Johnson and look at the spinoffs, although they've mostly absorbed into Bigger defense contractors at this point Boeing bought DRT in '07?

This site has a good history http://blackradios.terryo.org/index.html

rfdave··on LimeSDR
WiFi is hard to support, it's very complex from a signal processing and timing perspective.
rfdave··on LimeSDR
Well, it would also cost at least 10x what a dual purpose LoRA/WiFi radio would cost if it were built out of LoRa parts from Semtech and an ESP-32.
rfdave··on Ask HN: Product teams who value deep work – What is your communication stack?
It's not a tools problem, it's a people problem. Use whatever tools your team is used to, and build culture on top of that.
rfdave··on CaribouLite: Turn any 40-pin Raspberry-Pi into a Tx/Rx 6GHz SDR
For the most part, transmitting radio in the US is only allowed in a few frequency bands, referred to as the ISM band. These have pretty strict transmit power and duty cycle limits. If you get a ham radio license, then many more bands open up to you.
rfdave··on CaribouLite: Turn any 40-pin Raspberry-Pi into a Tx/Rx 6GHz SDR
Lolz. Low power in the wrong place can be a problem.
rfdave··on Using a Pager in the 21st Century
One of the last gasp paging technologies was two way paging, which included a slow return channel to confirm message reception.
rfdave··on Using a Pager in the 21st Century
Paging was also highly interested in making sure every bit that went over the air generated revenue, so adding bits to provide security was a hard sell. FLEX and ReFLEX are 90's technology.
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