This is conjecture but I'm pretty sure the idea of it even being an "index" is a stretch. More like people who work in disaster relief talking about their jobs informally. "I just got back from Town A. They had a tornado but it wasn't too bad. The Waffle House stayed open." "I'm heading to Town B. They've been having flooding so bad the Waffle House has been closed for 12 hours." That sort of thing.
Edit: Apparently FEMA contacts local businesses including Waffle Houses in the areas affected by a disaster to ask how they are doing. This makes sense as an added source of data to gauge the severity of an emergency. Still a stretch to call it the "Waffle House Index".
4000 VMs doesn't imply 4k satellites, does it?
Regarding revenues, it may be correct if it is a specific division of SL.
Anyways, OneWeb has 130+ millions in annual revenues (and a fleet of 400+ satellites, which would result in 10 VMs per satellite <- fwiw).
I truly loved the way this article is written. To the point, sharp and quite comical. I certainly hope they achieve to clean the mess up.
GPS jam uses data from aircraft ads-b GPS accuracy data reported, so they should have global air traffic route coverage. Would be interesting to fuse that data with this data (sensor fusion).
I am quite skeptical at least with the low interference. My entire country, NZ, the whole of Europe, India, USA and most of inhabited Australia and Canada are reported having low Interference. Is this likely to be true?
Yes, because jamming GNSS in those countries incurs penalties from RF regulators (broadly speaking). Consider the power output required in order to impact gps accuracy at airliner cruising altitude (~9-10km above ground level). Your RF emissions will not go unnoticed by those responsible for ensuring RF hygiene within their jurisdiction.
You pinpoint a truly important thing, even though I cannot put words onto it, I think that getting lost with AI coding assistants is far worse than getting lost as a programmer. It is like doing vanilla code or trying to make a framework suit your needs.
AI coding assistants provide 90% of the time more value than the good old google search. Nothing more, nothing less. But I don't use AI to code for me, I just use it to optimize very small fractions (ie: methods/functions at most).
> The future world of GPT-5 and Sonnet-4 still won't read your thoughts.
Chills ahead. For sure, it will happen some day. And there won't be any reason to not embrace it (although I am, for now, absolutely reluctant to such idea).
It's why these no-code/vibe-code solutions like bolt, lovable, and replit are great at hackathons, demos, or basic front-ends but there's a giant cliff past there.
There's this utility threshold due to a 1967 observation by Melvin Conway:
> [O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
> It's why these no-code/vibe-code solutions like bolt, lovable, and replit are great at hackathons, demos, or basic front-ends but there's a giant cliff past there.
Back in the day, basically every "getting started in Ruby on Rails" tutorial involved making a Twitter-like thing. This seemed kind of magic at the time. Now, did Rails ultimately end up fundamentally end up totally changing the face of webdev, allowing anyone to make Twitter in an afternoon? Well, ah, no, but it made for a good tech demo.
I bet those kind of boxes work very well when there are less than 30 connections at once. All in all, if it is about accessing useful information, I think this is somehow brilliant (as you wrote).
Great crazy thing!
I am waiting for the addition of "self contained QR code" to canitrundoom (although I don't know if it can be technically approved).
Yet... that game will now make me think twice before scanning any QR ^^
Why asking people to do something you should have done first?
If there's anything worthy in it, then point to those interesting documents where HN community would be more than happy to help.
I am confused about FEMA: are they using some automated process or is it an abandoned index?
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